Fareed Zakaria Breaks Down the Future of AI, Israel v. Gaza, & Why China Won’t Fail

YERRR – the boys brought in global brainiac Fareed Zakaria to explain literally everything going on in the world right now – and this man did not miss. From Trump’s tariffs and broken promises to the AI revolution and why the middle class keeps getting bodied, Fareed breaks it all down with surgical precision. He dives deep on Israel’s aggression, U. S. bombing Iran, birthright citizenship, and what the hell is going on with rare earths, semiconductors, and China’s grip on Africa. Plus – healthcare, right-wing populism, fusion energy, and why DOGE might’ve been the beginning of the end. All that and way more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 00:00 Welcome Fareed 1:05 No net positives with Trump tariffs 7:10 Restoring industries + Embracing tech 12:10 Consumption is king 15:28 Reliance on allies + Rare earths 22:45 No industrial revival, AI + UBI 29:52 Middle class left behind + Networking 42:44 Healthcare incentives + Simplification 54:13 Balancing budgets + Cultural backlash 56:50 Right wing populism + New asylum system 1:07:19 Du Plessis vs Chimaev 1:10:51 Birthright citizenship + Compromising morals 1:17:40 US bombing Iran + Israeli dominance 1:21:58 Why is Israel acting like this? 1:28:22 What does Israel give the US? 1:30:43 Greater Israel + Iranian sponsorship 1:39:21 US supreme dominance + Peace in Middle East 1:46:52 Saudi Arabian reform + Markets find a way 1:52:06 Türkiye, Power hungry + Enticements 1:57:30 Striking deals + Long-termism 2:04:19 USAID + DOGE failure 2:08:56 Indian support of Modi 2:16:13 How long to create new manufacturing? 2:20:13 Chinese economy + University Research 2:27:03 Taiwan + What is a semi-conductor? 2:35:22 China's influence in Africa 2:37:44 How close are we to fusion? 2:41:14 Kissinger's negotiations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:30Speaker 04

  What's up, everybody? Today, we are joined by a man with the jawline of a Bollywood sex symbol and the hairline of Count Dracula. Born to a Muslim family in India, he became an American citizen in June 2001. Just made the cut. More than likely, he's a renowned journalist, expert in US foreign policy, geopolitical affairs. He's a three-time, as of last week, Emmy winner, a Peabody Awards winner, and has become one of the most insightful voices on global affairs and geopolitics despite working for CNN. Today, we're giving you the ultimate 2025 explainer on every major geopolitical conflict, from Israel-Palestine, Ukraine-Russia, Epstein Island to Love Island. We'll be diving deep into everything happening in the world, so give it up for the most

• 2:15Speaker 04

  successful H1B visas in US history, Fareed Zakaria.

• 2:23Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for taking the time, man. We hope you enjoyed our introduction. Oh, my God. Did we get everything right? It was all totally factory, right? It makes you realize sometimes in life, inflation is a good thing.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  So tell us, what's going on in the world, man? Like, what are you? I know right before we started, you said you wanted to talk about America, its relations to its allies, the tariffs, the Trump stuff. But is there anything? I mean, we can even start there. Do you think there's been any net positive to the tariffs?

• 2:52Speaker 05

  Honestly, no. I know you're supposed to say on the one hand, on the other hand...

• 2:55Speaker 04

  You say whatever you want.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  I'll tell you, to me, the tragedy of this is like, one of the superpowers of America, the real superpowers, is that we have this group of countries that are our allies, that are friendly with us, that trade with us, that we've built this ecosystem. And so you can't just look at what we can do. You have to really ask yourself, what can we do along with Europe, along with Japan, along with Australia? Because they're all on board. They're all part of the American ecosystem.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:26Speaker 05

  And if you look at the tariffs, the way Trump is doing them, they actually get slammed the most because they're being punished for trading with us closely. Because the ones that we have a lot of trade with are the ones that end up getting the worst.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Tariffs even higher.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  I mean, crazily, the one country exempt from all the tariffs is Russia. But even if Trump had thrown Russia in, the truth is, we don't do that much business with Russia.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Maybe that's why.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  It wouldn't make a big difference. But it's the Canadians who've linked their economy to ours for the last 30, 40 years that are getting slammed. It's the Mexicans who've reformed their economy to essentially make it almost like an integral part of the American supply chain. Like, we don't make cars in America anymore. We make cars in North America. And the parts go back and forth 16 times, which is why the tariff rates are sometimes really high because every time one part crosses a border...

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Oh, you gotta pay that tariff.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  You gotta pay that tariff. It's the Europeans. So to me, that's the tragedy. It's like, we don't realize that that's... That's the unique thing about America. Like, you know how many military alliances... China has Russia and North Korea. You know how many we have? Fifty-nine.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Right? That's the, that's what makes us special.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  So help, help us understand this, just like the average American like myself doesn't really know much about this. Uh, I keep hearing people saying, oh, these tariffs are devastating. They're bad for foreign relations. They're bad for foreign policy. Yet, many of these countries that we are now imposing tariffs on tariff us. So why is it only bad for foreign relations when we are tariffing them? I think the average American looks at that like, well, tariffs can't be that bad for foreign relations if they're all tariffing us.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  Right. So first important thing to understand again, among our allies, this is the advanced countries in the world. Average tariffs before Trump came to office were two and a half percent. So for everyone, but so you can always find some.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  Averages get tricky though, right?

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Agreed. So they, the Europeans protect their agriculture.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  And so how much do they tariff us on, on agrarian products?

• 5:34Speaker 05

  They, they, so there are two kinds of things. One, they tariff us. It's not so much the tariffs. It's they don't take, they don't import American chicken.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  They refuse to take our stuff because they want to protect.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  That we want, our chicken is washed in chlorine. They think that that's, that's bad, you know? There are a lot of issues.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Who started that?

• 5:52Speaker 05

  There's a lot of issues on which, there are a lot of issues on which Europeans basically agree with, with RFK Junior.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Which is to say that we have too many chemicals in our food and things like that.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  They might be right about that.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree. I actually think they're right about it. One of the few areas where I totally agree with RFK Junior is on all that stuff, you know? He points out, if you look at it.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  On everything.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  A box of, a box of cereal, cereal in the, in Europe has like eight ingredients. The same box of cereal has eighteen ingredients. They're like, what are the, what are the ten things that we're putting in that they, they ban?

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  You know, so, so some of it is those kind of tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers. But, but the main point, because what you're saying is true, is that they tariff us. Look. Everybody protects a few things, but we lived in a very low tariff world so that these things, these were not major distortions. And you could have your pet peeve, like you wanted to protect some agriculture, we wanted to protect something. What we've done is we've gone from two and a half percent, we're at fifteen percent now. So that's like a sixfold increase. And what that's going to do is make everyone else raise their tariffs more. So every, suddenly everybody-

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Why would it do that?

• 7:02Speaker 05

  Because they have to retaliate, right?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Why?

• 7:04Speaker 05

  Well, because their feeling is if you're putting, if you're blocking our goods, we're gonna block your goods.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  But what if we say, no, you don't do that. You have access to our market, and our market is bigger, and therefore we have some leverage.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Right, and, and so that's what, that's, that is essentially what-

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Like when Costco buys a bunch of stuff, they get a much lower price, so. When we buy a bunch of stuff, we get a much lower price.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Now, remember, the European Union, which on trade acts as one, have about as much power as we do in that sense.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  But we're dismantling that European Union every day.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  No, no, the trade, on trade stuff, they're pretty unified, so.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, but we got England out of there, so we're good. We're gonna break it down, so we can manage.

• 7:38Speaker 06

  I don't think I'm doing great on a teller.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  No, I tease, but like- And, and, so you're right, the two, the two kind of players that can, that can go mono on mono-

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Exert that influence and force.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Are the Chinese and the European Union.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Because they've got enough, they've got a bunch of leverage. But, you know, we'll always have a slightly higher, so you're right, they won't raise them to the level we do, but they'll raise them a, a, a certain amount. And all my point is, who suffers? The consumer, right? The American who goes to Walmart and now his food is more expensive, his clothes are more expensive. And by the way, that, you don't give a shit whether this, this shirt costs you twenty percent more, but, but a person-

• 8:15Speaker 04

  I don't, but there are people who really do.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  But a person who lives on thirty-five thousand dollars a year.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  One thousand percent.

• 8:20Speaker 06

  So walk me through this, because I, I'm not an economist, but the theory to me that I understand-

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Skin looks great today.

• 8:26Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you, dude, I appreciate that. I like, I really, I put on, my wife-

• 8:28Speaker 04

  I was, I was complimenting him so much that I forgot how handsome you were.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  Dude, thank you, I appreciate that, I was feeling left out.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Anyway, I would go along with that.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he's a good-looking guy, right?

• 8:37Speaker 05

  I fully disagree.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  Tans, like a tan. So anyway, as you play out this America First thing, I understood the idea. We go to middle America a lot for these shows and I see there is, there used to be manufacturing there and there's not. And I actually empathize with what they thought Make America Great meant, a lot of them. I'm sure there were racist people, but I think a lot of them were like, yo, we used to have manufacturing, you used to have jobs in the city and now there's nothing. So, as in my mind, as I play that out, does that not eventually force America to build its own warehouses back up, to build its own manufacturing back up? Maybe even forward-thinking things like supercomputer facilities or whatever. Do the tariffs not, in the long run, pay off in that sense or not?

• 9:15Speaker 05

  So, it's a great question, because that is at the heart, really, of what Trump is trying to do. And I totally agree with you, that is a huge problem, that we deindustrialize and we deindustrialize very fast and like it hurt certain areas a lot more than everywhere. But here's the problem, when you look at every rich country in the world, what has happened is, over time, you lose manufacturing and you move it into services. And it's a very simple reason why. As you get richer and richer, look at your own lives, okay? As countries get richer and richer, they buy less stuff and they buy more services. So if you look in 1960, about half of all American consumption was on goods. Now, 25% is on goods, most is on services.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  Can you give an example of a service that we would transition to?

• 10:01Speaker 05

  What we are doing. Entertainment, software, software services. You know, so...

• 10:07Speaker 06

  So going out to shows, dining out would be, these are all services?

• 10:11Speaker 05

  All services, law, accounting, finance, consulting, software, software services, entertainment.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Opposed to a developing country who would spend more money on?

• 10:19Speaker 05

  Making steel, making aluminum.

• 10:22Speaker 06

  So the newly industrialized nations are putting as much, the possible emphasis that they can on that, whereas we're, you know, buying movie tickets.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  Now, give you a simple, you know, eighty percent of the American economy in terms of employment, eighty percent of Americans are employed in the services economy in America. You know how many are employed in manufacturing? Eight percent. And actually, of that eight percent, half of all manufacturing jobs are in branding, sales, which are service jobs. So really, it's four percent on the factory floor. So you're taking eighty-five percent of Americans, you're taxing them, you're penalizing them to subsidize this four percent, which is shrinking. Now, so, but let me just finish one thought, which is, the reason we've surged ahead of all the other countries in the world over the last thirty, forty years, and we have,

• 11:12Speaker 05

  and I can go through the numbers if you want, is because we embrace the future. We said, we're gonna be, we're gonna lean into technology, we're leaning into services, software services, we're the entertainment, you know, we dominate the world in terms of entertainment. We export all that stuff to the world. We have huge trade surpluses. In other words, we send out a lot more of that than we buy of anybody. And what was the last, you know, Kazakh movie you saw, right? Borat. And Borat doesn't count. But, by the way, Trump doesn't count this. For him, the services economy doesn't exist. All he looks at, when he looks at these tariff rates, is stuff, goods. How many, you know, cars did I sell you?

• 11:57Speaker 05

  How many cars did I buy? But the point is, we became the world's leading economy because we leaned into the future. And that's where, so, give you a simple statistic. The German wages and US wages twenty-five years ago were roughly the same, roughly speaking, we were a little higher. We're now like, our wages are thirty percent higher than German wages. European wages, on average, were fifty percent higher. If Britain were to join the United States as the fifty-first state, Britain would be poorer than every state in the Union. It is poorer than Mississippi on a per capita GDP basis. Why? Why? Because we embrace services.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  So how can they sustain life if they have such a small GDP?

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Well, they're small. All the countries, but so I'll give you the numbers.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Comparatively to.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Mississippi is about per capita GDP is about forty seven thousand.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  I think Britain is forty six thousand. So I mean, they're, they're okay, but, but by the way.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  It's the cost of living less?

• 12:53Speaker 05

  France is even lower. Standard of living is lower. That's the big difference. The standard.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  That's something I noticed.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  Think about, look at an average house size. Look at the number of rooms, air conditioned. Look at the number of cars and average. The size of the showers in your.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  When I, when I was living in Spain, I noticed that, that there was just an acceptance of a, a, a lower standard of living. Not to insult it, like, I thought it was really enjoyable. I had a great fucking time living there.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Right.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  But it wasn't the same, like, just assuming your apartment is AC is an American thing.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  You know, assuming everybody has a flat screen.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  Exactly. Now, now here's an interesting question, though, which is, I leave, I throw it out to all of you. The Europeans, particularly in the north, where their, where their incomes are a bit higher and they have really good government and works well. They find that they actually, the quality of life in terms of happiness, they're, they score much better than we do.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Who's doing those tests?

• 13:46Speaker 05

  It's self, it's self-report. In other words, you, are you happy with your life? That's what, so my, but my question is, do you think it all, you, do you think you're always going to be happier if you're making more money? That is a misconception.

• 13:58Speaker 07

  This is my concern, is that we're talking about consumerism in America and obviously our wages have gone up. But is it possible that that is indicative of an empire in decline? That, you know, like in previous generations, you were guaranteed a job and now we're guaranteed stuff and low prices. It was sort of the promise to my generation. And I wonder if as we become this consumption machine, that could be, potentially lose our leverage on a global scale.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Well, you know, the part that I, that resonates with me is, and when you're talking, you guys are talking about going to the middle of the country. The thing I noticed when I traveled, you know, because I wrote a book where I tried to deal with some of these issues. So what you notice is there are places where the factory went away, but people still have jobs. Look, unemployment in America right now is at a 50-year low. And it's been at roughly that low for five or six years. It's not a Trump versus Biden thing. But what has gone away is the community. You know, because if everybody in a Midwestern town would work for the steel factory, they'd all go to church together. They'd all be members of the Kiwanis Club. They'd all go to the movies together. They'd all, you know, go to the hardware store together.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  There's an identity wrapped into it.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  And that's, it's like a community and a sense of belonging and purpose. And that has gone away. But a lot of it is not, you know, globalization. I mean, why did, the movie theater went away because of Netflix, right? The hardware store went away because of Home Depot. The factory may have gone away because of globalization. But it's a combination of these forces of modernity that are eroding, you know, these community structures that we had. And that's a tough one. Like, what do you do?

• 15:35Speaker 08

  And we're tribal species, so that does make sense.

• 15:37Speaker 06

  All right, guys, let's shout out some dates. August 1st and 2nd, Kansas City, Missouri. August 8th and 9th, Perrysburg, Ohio. That's Toledo, I believe. August 22nd and 23rd, Liberty Township, Ohio. It's a lot of Ohio. September 11th and 13th, I'm back in civilization in Dona Beach, Florida. September 25th and 26th, back to hell in Ohio. And this is a show that's, I'm very excited to do it, but it's gonna sell out. October 5th, Dubai Comedy Festival. I didn't get to go last year. It was a big mix-up. This year, I'm there. The tickets are already like 80% sold out, so you need to hurry up and buy those. All those dates and more at akashsingh.com. Get your tickets. Also, I am very excited to announce The Akash Singh Show.

• 16:21Speaker 06

  This is my podcast. I flew out to India to record a bunch of episodes because of everything that is happening with free speech over there. Court cases with friends of mine being threatened with jail time. Honestly, I'm not sure how many episodes I can put out because lawyers have been calling me left and right and my friends' lives are in danger. But we are still going to put out a bunch of great episodes with people that I'm excited to talk to. So it's on my YouTube at Akash I sing comedy. Please check it out. I love you all. Thank you guys so much.

• 16:47Speaker 07

  Chandler, Arizona, San Diego, Burlington, Vermont, Montreal, Toronto, Berkeley, Detroit, a bunch of other dates getting added. I can't wait to see you guys at the show. I'll be doing one hour of standup comedy. That no more, no less. See you guys at the show.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  So here's my question. Let's assume that we did embrace the future and that we have, you know, succeeded better than any other country in the world at embracing the future. We, at the end of the day, are primal animals.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  There must be a cost to embracing the future and outsourcing a lot of these industries. And I've heard a lot of people talk about this and the cost of that might be like, hey, to build a submarine in America might be a little tricky. To build a fighter jet might be a little tricky. We gotta, we gotta get these parts that they only make in China. So now potentially, we're getting parts for our submarines from a country that might not want us to build the best submarines. Can you explain like, what would be your steel man argument for the downside of converting into a consumption economy? Like, what, give me like, it can be fear based, but like, just give me what the realistic concerns are of that.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  So I think that is the realistic concern. My view, the realistic concern is not like, we should be making everything in America. We can't. Like, we're, you know, there, the margins on making, you know.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Capitalist system won't incentivize it.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Right, right. I mean, it's just like, they've done the math. It would cost $3,500 to make an iPhone in America, right? So that's like more than twice as expensive. But the national security argument I think is real, that we, there are some core areas where you don't want to be dependent on countries that may be your geopolitical adversaries, may not have your best interests in heart. But that's why I come back to our allies, our ecosystem. So the truth is, we don't need to make all the steel in the world right here in America. But if the Canadians are making it, if the Europeans are making it, we built a defensive, and we protect them, right? So that's why I feel like the turning on our friends.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  This is very interesting.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  Is the worst idea. I'll give you an example. Through computer chips is the, you know, everybody understands this is like the, the holy grail of the modern world. So the company that makes That does the X-ray lithography that actually makes the chips, you know, that puts the, puts the transistors on the chips, which is now down with so, there are so many billions of transistors on each little chip that basically can only be done by an X-ray machine. That X-ray machine is only made by one company in the world. It's ASML. It is the most advanced piece of equipment probably we make in the world. It has four hundred thousand parts. It costs three to four hundred million dollars. You need three Boeing seven forty sevens to transport it. And the temperature inside that machine is five times the surface of the sun.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  That machine is only made by one company. It has, it has a ninety-five percent market share. It's not an American company. It's a Dutch company. But because it's part of our ecosystem.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  We have access to.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  And we tell it, don't buy, don't sell to the Chinese. They don't sell to the Chinese. We tell it, don't sell to the Russians. They don't sell to the Russians. So we can't make everything ourselves, but if we were to embrace our friends, we have, and that's what like, as I say, nobody else has this kind of relationship.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  So this is, this is really interesting, right? And I think this is something that I don't begrudge the average, average American for not knowing, because like, I don't know it, you know? The, the importance of these relationships in your house, you can outsource certain things that you used to do in your company, uh, country to other countries that you are allied with. But is it possible that some of the things that we are outsourcing are not to our allies? Are there certain things that we are reliant on to our adversaries?

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Yes, we are, and we should be changing that. That's a hundred percent.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  And then should we subsidize those things with the government? If there isn't a capitalist market that will support them, like, what is something that we are reliant on our adversary, like pharmaceuticals, for example? I think we get a lot of them from China.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  So the best example would be these rare earths. You've probably heard about them, right?

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Greenland.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Right. So the, the cool, the cool, most important thing to understand about rare earth is they're not rare.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  They're called rare, but they're actually widely available.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  The processing of rare earth to turn it into the magnets that we need is what is a very complicated, energy intensive and dirty process, environmentally extremely dirty. Like, you know, massive pollution of air and water when you do it. We decided we didn't want to do that because, you know, for all that, those reasons. So we can try and bring it back and I think we should come up with some strategy. But keep in mind, you're gonna have a really hard time finding an American community that says, "Yeah, okay, it's okay in my backyard," right? Like, everyone wants it in theory, but then you try to find a place in America.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  That's a great point, yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  And again, my point would be, why not talk to the Indians?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  That's a much, that's a much larger issue than you're talking about.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  But India is a poor country. It has, it is willing to put up with a trade-off that we are not willing to put up with. Why not talk to some...

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Environmental trade-off, you're saying, yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Right, right, you know, and look, because they already have a lot of pollution. They, they still have huge coal plants, so that's, but, but it is a real problem. And we should be, you know, but I would keep that list small because the danger is here, you know, you can kind of imagine every problem, you know, needing to be then made in America and then you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing all these industries. Keep the list small, make it strategic and say to yourself, what are the areas where you can find friendly countries that would be willing to do it?

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Where is that happening, the production of these big magnets?

• 22:22Speaker 05

  The, the rarest of is almost all in China. The Chinese made a strategic decision to do it. And I mean, I know it sounds like, like, what do you use a rare earth magnet for? So you know, in a car seat today, you can make like 17 different adjustments. Those are all rare earth magnets that are, that are doing it. Now, you could say to yourself, you know, do we want to go back? Could we go back to the old car seat? Probably, but we've gotten used to a lot of, you know, stuff like that.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  What about like, what about making a submarine? What about making, I was speaking to the guys on the All In Pod and they, they said that we just didn't have the production line capabilities in America at this point. How do we generate that?

• 23:03Speaker 05

  Correct. Some of it, um, I think will be very, very hard to do because it's, you know, these are a series of low end, energy intensive, often dirty, uh, you know, manufacturing processes that, you know, the markets are efficient. They went away for a reason and bringing them all back together will be very hard. Creating an ecosystem where they are done, you know, with, with a group of countries is going to be much easier. What we could do, first of all, actually, nobody manufactures a submarine. You know, these things are made in 10 countries. They're assembled. Even when people say the iPhone is made in China, it's not. It's made in 16 countries. It's assembled in China and that is all the low

• 23:45Speaker 05

  end stuff. The high end stuff is all done in California. So we've got to be savvy about understanding that. Like, we want to be involved in the critical parts that, that are the most important, the most value added. And the other stuff, if it's national security importance, our friends could do. I, I think that the idea that we can, you can judge me by this prediction. The idea that we're going to be able to bring back these entire supply chains into the United States i- is, is, is completely unrealistic. The one thing I can guarantee you is that Trump is not going to produce a massive manufacturing revival in this country. That number of, you know, 8% of Americans being involved is not going to go to 15. Uh, I'd bet my life on that.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  So then what would be your plan for revival of middle America economically?

• 24:34Speaker 05

  I mean, historically, what we've done is we run the economy fast and innovative and, and then we redistribute and we find, and part of what we haven't done over the last 30 or 40 years is redistribute. Where are the great worker retraining programs? Where are the great apprenticeship programs? Where are the great technical schools training, you know, plumbers and engineers and people who maybe don't have a college degree but want to make good money? And by the way, you can make very good money in many of those kinds of areas, but we need to scale up all of that. And, and what's really, I mean, the thing I really worry about. We're talking about reviving, you know, the 1950s economy. What's really about to hit us is AI.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  AI is gonna be, you know, what we're gonna have to do is have a serious conversation about what do all of us do? I mean, you, you guys are probably fine.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Who knows?

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Who knows, you know?

• 25:25Speaker 04

  But there's, I was thinking about this because like the next election will probably be decided. You know how the past elections like Obama was like the Twitter president and maybe this last election was Trump was TikTok or whatever. And the next one will probably be AI. And what I was, what I was really curious about with JD specifically is because he comes from an area of the country that was ravaged by outsourcing.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  Right? Like Appalachian Ohio. I think they, they give these like grants, these Appalachian grants where I think you just need to pass college, like high school, and you get free college anywhere.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Right? So I'm, I'm really curious. Like I actually just like to hear you say, but like, how do you make sure that doesn't happen all over the country? You've witnessed what happens when we leave a section behind.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  And it won't be just Appalachia. This will be like major parts of the country.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  Look, I mean, it's

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Isn't there like any like predictive planning that we can do for this? Like if we know what interest industries are going to be impacted, like, why don't we start leaning into that transition before, not after?

• 26:30Speaker 05

  And part of it is this is all happening so fast and nobody knows exactly what's gonna happen. But I think your intuition, I think is right. Like you look at what the CEO of Microsoft says, 30% of the code in Microsoft is now written by AI.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Oh dude.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  Right? So now, like you say to yourself, okay, I don't need to be, you know, a math genius to understand that that probably means you need 30% fewer programmers, right?

• 26:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. And you can always justify it by saying my obligation is to the shareholders.

• 27:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  So this increases the share price, so we rely off 30% of our staff.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  Well, and by the way, they are in a competitive environment where like if they don't do it, somebody's gonna do it.

• 27:08Speaker 06

  That's fair.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  Right? So think about lawyers. What do young lawyers do when they come on? They, they do what they call discovery or draft writing of, you know, Appeals of court, you know, appeals. These are all easy things for AI to do. David Solomon at Goldman Sachs said that the prospectuses that the investment bankers do, they used to take weeks and weeks. The AI does in two or three hours.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  There's a, this is something that came out recently from the Harvard BS reunion. This a few weekends ago, this happens like hardest business school. Didn't you go to Harvard?

• 27:44Speaker 05

  I went to Harvard, but I got a PhD. I didn't get a business degree. That's why, that's why, that's why I don't own this podcast. I'm just, I'm just a guest on it.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Check it. Okay. Fifty seven percent of Microsoft software code was written by AI in its most recent quarter. Coca Cola used AI for the design of 100% of its upcoming holiday marketing campaign. Salesforce is able to handle close to 85% of its customer service related inquiries with AI tools. The CTO of Moderna was recently appointed to the, to the additional role of the head of HR. The three, I guess, broad employee groups predicted to be most likely impacted by AI reside with its software, financial services and professional services. JP Morgan expects 80% of its credit underwriting process to soon be handled by AI. Eighty percent. A bank is going to get rid of 80% of its workforce.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  So here's, here's, here's the, here's the sweet irony, which may be only true temporarily, but the data currently is that

• 28:47Speaker 05

  computer science majors just graduating have a higher unemployment rate than art history majors.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  Which is kind of sweet.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  But it probably won't last, but the, but the reason is probably so many people went into computer science, thinking this is the sure thing. And AI does programming really well because.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Oh, because so many are going into coding, et cetera.

• 29:13Speaker 07

  Remember the whole learn to code trend?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:15Speaker 07

  You remember this? When people are telling truckers, like, oh, just learn to code. And now it's like, yeah, coders learn to truck.

• 29:21Speaker 06

  Well, this is actually to answer what you were talking about earlier. There was one candidate talking about this six, seven years ago, and nobody cared because we're all going to need a UBI. I don't see a way around needing universal basic income. Andrew Yang said it. We all laughed at him. We all thought he was a fucking idiot. And I think we as people are just so concerned with the problems right in front of us. We're not even thinking about the problems five, 10 years down the road.

• 29:45Speaker 05

  So let me ask you, what do you guys think about this? So my problem with UBI has always been, I think that human beings need not just money, but dignity.

• 29:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I understand that. I agree.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  And so that's one of the reasons this sounds super wonky. I've always preferred something that's called the earned income tax credit, which just to put it in simple language, what it says is we already have it. If you work a full-time job and you don't hit the, what you make is less than, but the poverty level, the government tops up your wages.

• 30:14Speaker 06

  I agree.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  And I think we should double that or triple that.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  We've been doing it with Walmart for years. Why not do it forever?

• 30:20Speaker 05

  And but the question is, I mean, that's expensive and that's going to, you know, you're going to need a lot of money to do. And even there, I worry, like, is there work for people to do in the, in the world that you were just describing, Andrew? Where like 80% of the work is still done by AI?

• 30:35Speaker 06

  So I'm not saying UBI is a solution to all of our problems. But and again, when 80% of jobs become unnecessary, fairly, much quicker than we think. What are we going to do for those 80% of people?

• 30:48Speaker 05

  What do you think people, what would people do in the day? Don't you think they'll feel like?

• 30:52Speaker 06

  I can't answer their purpose. No, I don't think we'll be happy. But I do think there's an immediate need, which is a lot of people are probably going to be unemployed soon. And we need something to at least satisfy their survival need.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  They'll just be more services. I think when people aren't doing things, they're not just sitting around. They're just going to be more forms of distraction. I think like one of the, I think one of the. We'll give each other massages.

• 31:11Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  The second time you ask about massages. We're too close to Chinatown for you to be talking to.

• 31:18Speaker 06

  Robots will do that better than you, don't worry.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  There's a, um, yeah, there's an interesting phenomenon, I think, happening right now where like you see a lot of people that are not necessarily poor, actually making really good money. Let's say you're in like the 90 to like 120,000 range, like the amount of money when I was growing up, you're fucking rich. Like that's what I thought. And, uh, but I think what they're experiencing right now is because of crippling college debt. They don't really feel an exit stretch.

• 31:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Right? So they're stuck in this like extended adolescence. Right? Where they're they at their flat screens, they're going to parties with their friends, they're enjoying things, but they don't really feel like they'll be able to buy a house or buy an apartment or maybe even start a family. There's this like real delayed adulthood. And I think that's where you're feeling a lot of frustration. I think that's like the where the Mumdani's start to come in and they have a lot of success where like the democratic socialists are really pushing. It's not for the the very poor people. When you saw poor people in New York, they voted for Cuomo pretty much, right? It's the it's the kind of like middle class that doesn't feel like they have escape velocity or escape opportunity. And now they're like, well, I need I need I deserve.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  It's almost like this, like a little bit of an entitlement that poor people don't have. They're like, I deserve to have a house and a family and to be super rich, but my loans won't let me do that.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  I totally agree. So if you look at the three areas of American life where costs have gone up way faster than inflation, it's education, healthcare and housing. And those are the three things that those people who I think you put it exactly right, they feel like, wait a minute, wasn't I promised this? Wasn't I told work hard? Take all the tests, go to a good college and and I'm and and the irony here is

• 33:03Speaker 04

  I got a good job. I'm making good money.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  And the irony here is all three of those areas, you have massive market distortions because caused by weird government involvement, weird oligopolies around hospitals, you know? So it's like the market actually doesn't work. If you were to

• 33:19Speaker 04

  You're not letting the market work.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Right. If you were to, I mean, look at Texas, not my favorite state for a lot of things, but for housing. They do phenomenally. They barely have a homelessness problem because of that, because they don't have all this restrictive, you know, zoning and regulation. Maybe we could learn something from that.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Well, this is what I'm optimistic with AI for is that it could be the case that AI disrupts, you know, employment and there's massive unemployment. But it could also be the case that it massively increases worker productivity and drives prices down.

• 33:50Speaker 07

  Right? Like, is that not also the case?

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 33:52Speaker 07

  We talk about education, like, the cost of education, obviously, it's inflated for a myriad of reasons. But if they're able to democratize education where it's largely free due to AI models that are able to teach kids, then is it possible that the cost of those things could go down and then you don't have these massive

• 34:06Speaker 06

  By me, it's

• 34:06Speaker 05

  No, but that, think about that.

• 34:08Mark Gagnon?

  And you get new kinds of jobs.

• 34:09Speaker 07

  Sure. Like, is it possible that could also be the case?

• 34:11Speaker 05

  That's what the techno-optimists say. And I think you gotta say, for most of history, they've been right. I just worry the speed and scale of this. I mean, this is so big. And secondly, if you look at history, there were periods of like sixty years where book average GDP didn't go up. Like, eventually, things worked out, but that's like a long period.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, long term, maybe. I think short term, if a CEO is saying, I could say, I could make increased profits, however many X multiplier by laying off this percent of my workforce.

• 34:39Speaker 07

  But what if they could make What if they could make the same profits as like, uh, like, think like a wealth manager. It's like, I don't take clients under a hundred thousand dollars because it's not worth the time.

• 34:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 34:47Speaker 07

  But now you can take on thousands of clients under a hundred thousand dollars because you have this AI model that does the same amount of time. And now you're able to increase your margins that much.

• 34:54Speaker 05

  That's very smart. I think that, you know, we're gonna, that's why I say we don't know what's gonna happen.

• 35:00Speaker 07

  But it's important to hear that side as well, because it's easy for us to get caught up in like the fear, like doom spiral. Right? But this idea that AI is

• 35:07Speaker 05

  You can see the jobs you're losing. You can't see the jobs of the future that are being created. And it's going to be a battle between the two, and we will

• 35:14Mark Gagnon?

  No, I was just saying, I think corporations are going to benefit the most because they have the money to invest in AI right now, and a lot of other places don't. And like, education is one of the places that I don't see them really investing in AI that much. Like, in terms of

• 35:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, why would an institution invest in an AI education software if it's gonna stop students from spending a hundred thousand dollars a year for going to do like keg stands for four years? I mean, that's what we did in college. Like, I don't think any of us really learned that much in college. It was a fun experience.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  I would say the same.

• 35:42Speaker 06

  I didn't drink or learn.

• 35:43Speaker 07

  You had to.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  I was a scholarship kid from India.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  We didn't all have Indian parents.

• 35:51Speaker 05

  I had to maintain a GPA.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  But I would say that's the same reason why all these online programs have exploded, right? Like in terms of like Harvard undergrad is like a few thousand, then their like online program is like tens of thousands.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 36:02Speaker 07

  So like these online programs are able to then spread it out, they're able to gain smaller margins. Or yeah, basically like less cost, but for way more people. And so in that vein, I'm like, could, why would they not do the same thing for AI? Be like, everyone can get an AI degree from our school.

• 36:17Mark Gagnon?

  But then are you gonna be like Cuba where everyone has a degree, but there's no jobs?

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Well, well, this is what's kind of happening now, right? We are already like Cuba without realizing it. We're like Cuba, now we're just stacked with debt. So Cuba just doesn't have the opportunity, but they have the education. Now you have this circumstance where going to an Ivy League institution, like you went to two fine institutions. I would imagine, you tell me if I'm wrong here, but the greatest benefit was being around other people and increasing your network.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  You don't get that going to Ole Miss. You don't get that going to UC Santa Barbara, like me. I met great friends that I'm friends to this day and it's amazing.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  And a beautiful place.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  It's incredible. It was awesome.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  I've spoken there, oh man.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  It's amazing.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  I thought to myself, I gotta, you know, find a way to be, get a, get a gig here.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  To enjoy that, but you shouldn't be educated.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Like, but, but when you go to, when you go to Harvard, you go to Yale and you're sitting down with like, you know, future presidents or future senators and future head fund managers and all these other people. Your, your book, right? Like the people that you can call to or access information or call to for help for your future projects. It's like invaluable.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  Hundred percent right. And it actually points to maybe an area where AI can't disintermediate, which is the physical networking that takes place among human beings that is still requires, you know, conferences and meetings and things like that. Like because ultimately, human beings are social. And you can't get, you know, you can't somehow do everything automatically without, without meeting, without, you know, trusting. Like something like trust, I think becomes even more important in a world of deep fakes and AI. So I, you know, it's gonna be very interesting to think about. When you have a technological push that moves you in this direction where they can do kind of everything analytic that you can do better.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Maybe we start to emphasize those qualities of human beings which are not about analytics, which are about, you know, our emotions, our ability to trust, our ability, EQ, you know, character, exactly. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Great thing.

• 38:27Speaker 05

  Right? Like that actually that's what is fundamentally human about us, our, you know, our ability to be brave and wise and loving and emotionally support other people. You know, maybe that's where we're headed.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. You're saying we'll just become France.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  I don't think of the French as emotionally very supportive. Take a doctor, right? Like a doctor, there used to be the whole idea, the doctor was used as brainiac who could diagnose what was going on, like he'd ask you a few questions. Well, I mean, the AI can diagnose way better than the smartest doctor in the world because AI knows like 40 million cases, you know? Well, how many doctors can remember 40 million? But maybe what the doctor's skills then become is talking to the patient, relating, understand, helping you understand your condition, helping you make the kind of lifestyle changes that you need to make in order to be successful on this path of recovery.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  That's a skill they don't teach in medical school.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:32Speaker 05

  It's all brainiac, brainiac, brainiac.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  That's nursing school.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. That's right. And it's, but maybe we need to reverse the order and say, you know what? Bedside manner, emotional support. Being a life coach is a core part of being a doctor, not just being this guy who I'm like a genius and I, you know, know how to do this.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that'd be great. I hope that happens.

• 39:52Mark Gagnon?

  All right, guys, take a break for a second. You mentioned prices increased the fastest in, what was it? Healthcare?

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Education and housing.

• 40:00Mark Gagnon?

  So you said maybe deregulation has helped Texas with housing. AIs can potentially help education in terms of bringing costs down. Why can't we do anything about healthcare?

• 40:12Speaker 05

  It's a great question. Healthcare is the toughest one because every, let's start by saying every country, every advanced country in the world, healthcare is a problem. Because, you know, there are two or three fundamental problems with the healthcare, which I think it makes the market not work really well. Number one, you go to a showroom and the salesman says to you, "You should buy this flat-screen TV. It's really cool and it's really good and it's twice as expensive than anything else." You're gonna say, "Ah, let me think about it. I don't know, I don't..." A doctor tells you, "You need to get this test." You're gonna get the test, right? There's an asymmetry of information. You can't, you can't bargain hunt for the best medical procedure or even whether you don't even know whether you need that medical procedure.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  You don't wanna haggle with your doctor.

• 40:58Speaker 05

  We get three times as many MRIs as people in Germany do. We don't need them three times as many MRIs. We get them because the system is incentivized to create that. Secondly, I think that there is a fundamental problem here, which is that the market's incentive is to have you be sick, need a medicine and not die, right? Like if you have diabetes, that's perfect for the market.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  Cause you're gonna be on that for the rest of your life, yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  Whereas the best thing for health is for you to be, for risk prevention, for you to never eat, you know that. But, but why will the healthcare system, why does it have any incentive to prevent problems? Because they make money by having you sick and resolving the problem, right? So, so there's a, it's an interesting kind of market failure, like, and that's where I think you need the government.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  And we don't do government that well. Like, you know, if you look at like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea, where they have good healthcare systems, which are very low cost, it's because they do government really well, like they're very, very...

• 42:03Speaker 04

  They also have a lot of faith in their government. I think that like, in the inception of America, right? It's baked it to resent, to fight back.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  It's decentralized, it's inherently fragmented.

• 42:14Speaker 05

  And we're anti-state by, by, you know, they like get the government off my back.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 42:18Mark Gagnon?

  Do you think we can pull off universal healthcare?

• 42:21Speaker 05

  Look, Medicare is basically universal healthcare. We've pulled it off pretty well. You know, I think that the fantasy we have is that like, nobody is making these decisions. Remember when Obama was being touted and they were like, there'll be death panels, syrupel. Well, we already have death panels. They're insurance companies. I mean, the insurance company decides whether or not this procedure is okay or not. And, you know, maybe it would be better to have some centralized group of experts who would decide, look, if you want this, God bless you, but we're not going to pay for it because we don't think it's medically necessary. That's what most of these other countries have.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  There's an interesting thing. So Shifty is one of the guys who works with us. He's our editor. I want everybody out back home to go wish Shifty a healthy recovery. He just had hip surgeries, like 20. How old is Shifty? Twenty-two. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old. And, but what's quite interesting is he had health insurance, but navigating the claim process was, is like virtually impossible.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Right? So what Shifty did, and this is to Mark's point earlier, is he just input everything in ChatGPT.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  And his insurance paid for it.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  He goes, I would never have been able to do this alone. I would have to hire, I think they're called like a health advocate or something like that.

• 43:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  But he had AI do it for him. So in the same way that like you see on Twitter, somebody posts on a crazy fake news headline, and then Grok immediately, or people ask Grok to, is this true?

• 43:51Speaker 05

  Verify this, yeah, yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Grok verifies it. Like Twitter is so much more enjoyable for me now that I'm not consuming all this rage bait without having a fact check on it.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Maybe that starts to happen with the healthcare companies and then they have to find a different system because you can't take advantage of the people now that we have an AI tool that's going to essentially fight back on their, I don't know if it's bureaucracy. Reverse incentive. Yeah, they're reverse incentive.

• 44:14Speaker 05

  No, you might be, you might. I think this may be an area where AI really helps because navigating the complexity of the healthcare system or of taxes.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  That's what I was gonna say. All these systems that seem like so daunting to us. Now we have something on our side, on our side, that can at least help us through it. And maybe my parents' generation won't be able to do it, but in order for me to help my parents or they'd be easy, I'm throwing in ChatGPT.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  It's kind of like, you know how like the robber barons?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Come about and then unions are like this equal and opposite force to the robber bar owners taking advantage of the worker. It's like, maybe we start to use chat GPT as this equal and opposite force to the, what do you call that? The, the like, the muck that you have to go through.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Economic bureaucracy.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  The economic bureaucracy or administrative bureaucracy that you have to go through trying to get your claim.

• 45:04Speaker 05

  You know, but it's a very interesting thing to ask yourself, why we do this? Why do we have so much of this? And it's true for Medicaid, it's true for food stamps, it's true. And there's a very good article by, in the Atlantic by this woman, Annie Lowry, who says, what we do is we put a time tax, you know, you, and it's particularly felt by the poor, because we're, we're so worried that somebody who doesn't deserve the benefits is going to get it. That we put so many requirements and, you know, and by the way, this new big, beautiful bill has added a huge number of them with regard to Medicaid and work and this, that, that, you know, you make it impossible for somebody to, and to go through it. And it takes so much of their time.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  And these are people who work, you know, real nine to five jobs where they're being clocked. It's not like, frankly, all of us who can take an hour off in the middle of the day and do stuff, right? And so it's, it's a very cruel thing to do to poor people, where the poor, they don't have many resources. And now you put this huge burden where they have to navigate this whole process. Maybe AI can help, but I really wish we would rethink that and ask ourselves like, you know, the thing, the thing about something like UBI. And by the way, all the data has shown that when you give benefits like this, it's much better. Just give people money. They're not stupid. You know, if you're giving them a benefit, don't make them jump through 16 hoops to prove this and prove that and prove

• 46:26Speaker 05

  that. You know, you're going to catch 1% fraud, but 99% of the people, you've made their lives miserable.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't think we think their intentions are to help people with these rules. I think we think their intentions are to not pay you.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  And that's why we don't trust them. And that was kind of my thing with Obamacare. It still gets touted a lot, but to me it was like. Maybe it's better than what we have, but I don't think the solution is to give everybody health insurance when we all know insurance companies are inherently pretty terrible.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, the one thing about Obamacare I thought that was pretty awesome was the pre-existing conditions. Like, talk to anybody who had pre-existing conditions, like before Obamacare, they were gonna die. They were just gonna die.

• 47:04Speaker 05

  Because they're never gonna get.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  And like, talk to Republicans that had pre-existing conditions, like coal miners, like people who work in factories and shit. That Obamacare came around and saved their fucking lives. I'm not saying they're gonna change the way they vote, but like, Obama has a special place in a lot of Republicans' hearts because of that.

• 47:19Speaker 05

  Look, the basic thing Obamacare tried to fix, and it only got some ways, you can't have a functioning insurance system where everybody doesn't buy in. Think about car insurance. If you said, "Oh, all the people who are most, you know, who are not gonna go in to get into accidents, you don't have to buy the insurance." They're the people who make the system work. Like, insurance workers, because a whole bunch of people who don't need it also buy it, because they pay for the people who end up, right? They balance it out. So in healthcare, when you say, "Young people don't need to buy," you can't do that. Like, the only systems that work, that are real insurance systems, everyone has to buy. Like, house insurance. If you don't have some minimum number of people all buying in, it's not gonna work.

• 48:03Speaker 06

  That kind of is like a universal health thing, in that essentially, like, I pay full price for health insurance, which for my wife and me is like $2,500 a month for not that good a coverage. It's fine. But that's kind of like a tax I pay.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 48:14Speaker 06

  To help people who need insurance. I just wish we could remove the insurance company. I don't mind paying a tax. Not that the government's gonna be that much better at it, but at least I don't think their intentions are to not pay, which I think that is the case with insurance companies.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  I think now we're getting to the point where it's like, what is the American criticism of like the Canadian healthcare service, or like the British healthcare?

• 48:33Speaker 06

  Healthcare's not as good.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  It's not as good, you're waiting on lines, you can't get a doctor visit, it's like... We'll wait in line, it's not as good, you can't get a doctor visit. You can either charge us and offer something spectacular, or you don't charge us and offer something adequate. You can't offer something adequate and charge us. That's where I think people start to revolt. And I think that's where the insurance companies have kind of, because of their incentive structures, have squeezed us. And we're at the point where, like, I'm not justifying this, but you have a guy shoot a healthcare CEO and then kind of be like celebrated on the internet. Like, if that's not indicative of how Americans feel about our healthcare system.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  I will say this. You know, all of this points to this one of a problem we have in America, which is when we don't want the government to be involved in something, but it kind of has to be involved in it. We end up devising the most complicated Rube Goldberg-type system that is totally inefficient and, you know, and that's what we have with healthcare, right? We're like, oh, if you look at so many of the tax credits we have in America, we're like, we don't want to say, we want to get the government to give you this money. So we're like, the government will give you a tax credit where you can, basically, the government is giving you money. But you've created this complicated system where the lawyers are going to get a piece, the accountants are going to get the piece, a consultant is going to... Why not just say, we're subsidizing this?

• 50:02Speaker 05

  We're writing you a check. So there's something like...

• 50:04Speaker 04

  Because then we're a socialist country.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  Exactly. So we have $1 trillion of government expenditures that are tax credits. Think about that.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  So we're already given a trillion dollars. But because our egos are tied into democracy and socialism and communism are so horrendous, we have to disguise it as something else.

• 50:21Speaker 07

  Is this buy-in system you're describing why we couldn't have like a dualistic, sort of like, public healthcare program as well as a private healthcare program?

• 50:28Speaker 05

  That's what I was wondering. I think that's what we should have. I mean, my own view would be have a basic system that's like a very, very bare-bones Medicare for All. And you can layer on top of it a gold-plated system.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  Whatever you want.

• 50:41Speaker 07

  You want to pay more.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  That is what it is.

• 50:43Speaker 07

  Public school, private school.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, the problem is, how do you get from here to there? And tried to get rid of the insurance companies. That was the end and that they revolted.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  And then they said that he got head in the Olo office.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was a lie from the insurance lawyers.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  You seen a propaganda that they throw at our heroes? What the hell is going on here? He said that he was on Epstein's island. He's trying to get rid of the insurance companies.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  Hey, last guy to balance the federal budget. Maybe, you know, whatever he was doing, it was working.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Now we're talking.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Feed on the interns.

• 51:17Speaker 05

  I want to be clear. I'm disassociating myself from that comment.

• 51:22Speaker 06

  Okay, that's interesting. How was he able to balance the budget? Did he just kind of let Wall Street run wild? Was that the idea?

• 51:29Speaker 05

  Here's the magical, crazy, Nobel winning idea that he had. He raised taxes and he cut spending. You gotta do both.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Like, it's math, right? I mean, that's the only way when you've got huge deficits like this, obviously you gotta do both. And what we did was we cut back our taxes and we sort of cut, we raised, you know, cut spending a little bit, but we raised it in so many different areas.

• 51:58Speaker 06

  You gotta win an election and you can't win an election saying, I'm gonna raise taxes. You just can't. People are gonna be like, fuck that.

• 52:06Speaker 06

  No, but he didn't say, I'm gonna raise taxes.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  But Clinton, but Clinton won in 96 after he had raised taxes. I mean.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  Oh, no. Yeah, and I remember my parents and my dad lost his job in 91 for like two years and then 93 opened a business. And like, I remember being like, yo, I feel like it's not just me. I feel like we're all kind of doing really well. And then 96, I think it was just, the momentum was crazy from the economy.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  But you know, your point about your dad losing the job, you know, it reminds me of something you brought up, which is, when you have this much change, oh, and you have, you know, what, what, what do we expect? And what, what we should have realized and that you're gonna get a backlash. You're gonna get a lot of anxiety because this much change, I mean, think about the amount of change we've had, globalization, okay, then information revolution, software, internet, mobile, cultural change. Think about how much the culture has changed in the last 30 years, the role of women, role of minorities, role of sexual minorities. All that stuff has exploded. Sexual minorities, gays, lesbians coming into the mainstream. You were thinking of more sex.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Well, it wasn't sexual, Latinos.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  Ironically, the role of sexual minorities is going up, but apparently, young people are having less sex.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  I know.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  What the hell?

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Because they keep talking about it.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  We need a sexual majority. My point is, like, you have that much change, you're gonna get a backlash, you're gonna have people say, wait, my world is disappearing.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  And I think a lot of the Trump phenomenon is, it's actually not that economic, it's, it's this cultural. It's, and I don't mean culturally in a racist sense, it's just like, my world is disappearing, my community went away. What, you know, give me back those, that's why, you know, the most important words on his cap are, again. Make America great again. So it's a politics of nostalgia. Let me go back to when, you know, all this crazy change wasn't happening.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  I thought that this was something that was idiosyncratic to the United States of America, okay? I'm on a boat in Ibiza, that is a very privileged sentence, and I'm very proud to say it. I'm on a boat in Ibiza, and I'm talking to the captain of the boat, right? And there was a captain, like, a first, like, helper or something like that. And I was like, so what's going on in Spain? Like, tell me, like, what's happening? You know, I saw there were some protests in Barcelona, and he gets comfortable enough, at first, he's kind of like nervous to share. And then he gets kind of comfortable, and he's like, honestly, yeah, it's like, um, you know, the immigration and like, the, you know, the left-wing government is just kind of letting all these Moroccans in. You know, at the front of the boat is one of my best friends who's Moroccan, he's just enjoying his, his life. And I'm like, yeah, he's one of them. He stops the boat, falls off.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  But, uh, but he's like, he's again, it's Moroccans are coming in, they let them come in, because when they're naturalized, they can vote, and it bolsters the support of the left-wing side. And he's essentially like echoing the talking points that you hear so many Americans talking about. So have you heard about this phenomenon? Like, why do we think there is? There seems to be this huge frustration in not just America, and I guess you're feeling it in Europe, and you could say a blame of the immigrants that are coming in, and a reluctance for maybe the government to place that blame, but the people... To feel it. Can you speak on this? Is there, if we were to make the argument for it, what would it be? What would the argument against it? Like, can we just speak on it intellectually, not like what we personally feel?

• 55:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  What is that sentiment?

• 55:32Speaker 05

  Right. So you're first of all, a hundred percent right. Right wing populism is happening all over the Western world, right? And it's important again to notice it's happening in places that like, don't have huge amounts of inequality, like Northern Europe. Sweden is like one of the more egalitarian places in the world. They've got a very strong right wing populist party. The Dutch, you know, have a big welfare state. They've got right wing populism. France coddles its workers more than anyone else. I can tell you, when I was at Newsweek, I tried to get rid of one person on our Paris office. Basically, I had to shut down the whole office. It was crazy. And they have right wing pop. They have a very strong party. In fact, it's the most likely to win right now if the elections were held.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  So, and all of them, the rocket fuel is immigration. So I think it's two things. One, we let too many people in too fast over the last several years. The US in 1975 was 5% foreign born. We're now 15% foreign born. Sweden in 1975 was probably 2% foreign born. It's now 22% foreign born. So it's like, and that's not even a country with a strong tradition of immigration, right? So these places just let too many people in. There's only so much you can assimilate. There's only so much you can accept.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  You are historically very pro-immigration.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  I'm totally pro-immigration. And I think that it is the distinctive thing that makes America tick. It's like these people coming in who are, you know, hardworking, driven. I don't even think it matters that they're the world's smartest. I think, you know, having somebody who's willing to cross, try to cross the Rio Grande three times to come and wash your dishes and look after your kids, that person has drive and determination. But there is a reality, numbers matter. Like, you know, how many people can a society digest? So I think, you know, and the left got that wrong.

• 57:21Speaker 04

  This is the nuance lost in the conversation, I think. Immigration is good.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, but numbers matter.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  And too high a number.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  And the speed matters. And the second. Piece of it is, I think immigration also becomes a kind of symbol for all these changes that we're talking about, right? Because how do you, how do you visualize fast movement of capital around the world? Fast movement of goods? How do you visualize the computer software program that got rid of a whole bunch of jobs? These are all abstractions. But the guy who moved into that town and he speaks a different language and he worships different gods and he looks different. That's a very traditional human reaction to say, you know, that's change and that's, that's changing. So some of it is the, the immigrant becomes the stand in for all these changes that are happening to your world.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  And you don't know how to put a, put a, you know, your finger on them. But boy, you can look at that guy and say, that's the problem.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  But what's interesting is they're not necessarily wrong to, they're not really necessarily wrong to say that there is a fundamental change. Maybe they're getting too much of the credit for the change because it's the easiest thing to put your finger on it. I love that. But this idea that a country could go from two percent to 22% foreign born, like that's going to cause some friction. There are going to be some changes there. And then what we do is we gaslight those people and go, ah, you're just racist and you're biggest. Some of them might be racist, but there might be others who are just like, hey, this feels different and we're not adjusting to this. And especially in Europe where they're like thousand year old cultures. In America, at least in New York, like.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  Everybody came from somewhere.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  All of our parents are immigrants, right?

• 59:00Speaker 05

  Everybody came from somewhere.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Everybody kept talking about like the immigrants in New York. I'm be completely honest, maybe it's the neighborhood or whatever, like, I didn't even notice, but they're like, everybody looks kind of like they just got here.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  But by the way, that's true in general, the places that are most worried about immigrants, like, you know, Montana, they don't have a lot of immigrants. The places that have the immigrants are like, we're cool. We're, you know, we're fine.

• 59:21Speaker 06

  Used to it. And so to your earlier point.

• 59:24Speaker 05

  And you know that they're just like normal people, they're trying their best, they're not, you know, threatened to destroy America.

• 59:29Speaker 06

  I was thinking to your earlier point, it doesn't feel jarring to us, like it doesn't feel like our world is changing. Because you, here in New York, you've always been used to seeing immigrants. So it doesn't feel like it's changing when there's more, you don't even know.

• 59:40Speaker 05

  And you're used to change. New Yorkers are rapidly changing. Your point about Europe is so good. Like, what do we like about Europe when we visit?

• 59:48Speaker 04

  Especially if it's French. It's Italian. Like, we're going there for that experience.

• 59:52Speaker 05

  So you go into the village and it looks like everybody's been the same. Baker looks the same and it looks like his grandfather was the baker.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 05

  Like, but imagine the new guy from Morocco. Where is he gonna fit in? Right? Like, you wouldn't worry about that for a minute in America. And that's why I think we shouldn't give up, you know, the, not just immigration, but the pride we have in it, because we do it really well. We assimilate people really well in this country. Look, I'm an immigrant. As you said, we're all in some way connected, but I am an immigrant. I grew up in India.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  We got that Islam out of you immediately.

• 1:00:29Speaker 05

  I can tell you, this country is, there's no question. It is more welcoming. It allows people to find their own place in it. When I became Ronald Reagan was president and he said, he had a line which I loved. He said, "In America, we don't care about your origins. We care about your destination."

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Fire.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  And that's a great line.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Love it.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  And that is the way we should think about it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  So what is the, what is the rate, do you think? Like, and it's impossible to judge right now, but if we think that there was a time where it's too few, a time where it is too much, where do we assess what is the right amount for assimilation to not have like that jarring kind of culture shock and for the average American or Western person in a Western country to not place that blame? Because we know that will be the impulse.

• 1:01:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  Like, we're aware of how humans act and we have to kind of, we can't tell humans not to be human.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Right? Because we'll fail every single time at that. So how do we figure out what that rate for immigration is that makes the people coming in feel welcomed, which is what you want, and gives them an opportunity to assimilate? Like, if you're coming into a place that's 22%, right? We go into Sweden and I imagine, as any immigrant, you would go to a place where there's a lot of your people. You have no need to assimilate because you're within that community. You're probably speaking that language. And then there's this chasm that begins to grow. So what do we think the rate is?

• 1:01:50Speaker 05

  So we've, the United States takes in about 1 million legal immigrants a year. We've all, we've done that for many, many years. It's never really caused a problem. You know, 350 million people in this country, 1 million. And it actually helps us enormously demographically. Because the truth is, in America, we have a demographic problem. And if you look at the white fertility rate, it's actually much lower. It's at European levels. Yeah. So basically, the two things keeping America going demographically are Latinas. Immigration. Yeah. And immigrants, not just Latinas. Immigrants. Immigrants have more kids. Hey. Yeah, we do. So two is, two is replacement, right? Two parents having two kids. It's if you have more than two, that you're actually helping.

• 1:02:35Speaker 05

  I will point out, I am an Asian American immigrant. I have three kids. Oh, there you go. Boosting, boosting the average.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Get them out! Get them out!

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  So the problem became the breakdown of the asylum system. Basically, people, you know, people who are poor and dispossessed in places like Latin America and Central Americans, they may be poor, they're not stupid. They realized that there was a loophole in the system. If you came to, tried to cross the Rio Grande and you were trying to do it, you know, without any cause, you got, you got hunted down and thrown out. But if you came and said, I am seeking asylum because I have a credible fear of political persecution, you got a lawyer, you got two court hearings, you got to stay in the country. And so guess what?

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  The number of asylum seekers, which used to be in the thousands, is now in the millions. Right? And so obviously, the system is being gamed. And nobody wanted to say this. I've been saying this for a while and, you know, you can catch hell for saying it. But obviously, these people are gaming the system. Right. And nobody wanted to point this out. And I think the answer is, we gotta just scrap the asylum system we have and come up with a new one. You know, we've got to either put limits on it, or we've got to have very stringent requirements, or we've got to have requirements that you can only apply from your home country. Because, you know, look, we live Live in an age of technology now, you don't need to show up at the border. Right? You can apply by you, you know, if you have a smartphone, you could apply.

• 1:04:08Speaker 05

  So we've got to completely reconceive that. That is what broke down. If if Joe Biden had just not done one thing, which was to have reversed all of those Trump bans, I think he, yeah, I think the Democrats, I don't know whether he would have had a chance to win. Because he did open up the gates and he did let in millions.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  And they need to be accountable for that. All right, guys, let's let's talk about some UFC fights for for a second. I'm very interested in this Chimaev Duplessis fight, DDP versus Chimaev. Yeah. So here's the thing, like, DDP has had so much success with his, like, very unique style. Yeah. And like, you're even seeing guys like Style Bender and stuff just give it up. He's like, he's just difficult, like, he comes at you, he throws caution to the wind. Yeah. And like, it's very hard to plan for and Chimaev is like, a traditional, like, beautiful wrestler, traditional in terms of his striking ability. But like, you're looking at a guy who's unorthodox versus wildly orthodox. Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  And they're just gonna clash. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. And it's and DDP is big. So that's the thing. It's like, Chimaev is unbelievable at wrestling. But like, will he be as effective versus a guy who cuts a lot of weight and is fucking strong?

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  Has Drag is taken on just a traditional wrestler type? I don't think who's in the weight class that even would wrestle him.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  We gotta look. I mean, this is gonna be different. Like, Chimaev is like exceptional.

• 1:05:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  But, uh.

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  Even just stylistically, like, I just can't imagine Duplessis would wanna go to the ground with him.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't wanna do that.

• 1:05:45Speaker 07

  So then I wonder if that makes him not approach as strong.

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  That's and he only has one way of approaching. There's the other thing where it's just like, if it's worked for you your whole career, and you're beating the best guys on the planet with this style, I think these guys are so confident in their style, they're like, "I'm not gonna change anything for this guy." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get that approach too. It's like the Tom Thibodeau approach. Where it's like, "This has got us to the playoffs, so I'm not gonna change anything." But sometimes you need to fucking make a change. What do you guys think? You think?

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  I think this, I don't know much, I just think, like you said, it's gonna be two very diverse styles. I love that idea in a fight, like what wins out? Not giving a fuck, or being the most locked-in, disciplined from that, where the Dagestani, whatever, like, these guys are...

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think he's Chechen. Oh, he's Chechen? Yeah, he grew up in, I think, Sweden, but like, his, I think his family comes from Chechnya, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:06:37Speaker 06

  Super disciplined, and then just, dude, watching Drikis, it's like, it doesn't make sense how he's winning. Seems like he just puts his head down, charges in, takes whatever abuse you give him. He can't even fucking breathe, and then he wins. It's like, it's the craziest thing. It made no sense. Obviously, I'm watching the Izzy fight, we're all rooting for Izzy, and watching Drik is just kind of like, be relentless. It's crazy. But then again, with a wrestler, can he just hold him down, pin him down, whatever, it doesn't matter?

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  That's the other thing. Can you mitigate that by just keeping it on the ground? Because he's so unpredictable on the feet, that you're like, "I don't know if I wanna get into these exchanges."

• 1:07:09Speaker 06

  Izzy's a striker, so he couldn't just take him to the ground. But if you can just take him to the ground, does that kind of take away all of his...

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  Great point.

• 1:07:16Speaker 06

  That's what I would lean toward, but I don't know much.

• 1:07:18Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. I don't bet against the dice, Danny.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  Well, he's Chechen, and I don't know if he knew that.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  For two Americans, that's that.

• 1:07:25Speaker 07

  If there's no mustache, I don't bet against him. If it's just beard, no mustache, then I just, yeah, I just feel like you're gonna be able to bait him in, and he's gonna, I imagine Drikis is gonna get antsy and like, just fucking go full force, especially if it goes into later rounds, and then, yeah, Chmav just takes him to the ground and fucking taps him.

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  What do you think, Al?

• 1:07:44Mark Gagnon?

  Ditto, it's your point. You can't go against a stand, man. Even though he's not from a stand.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Sheik is the leader in global betting. You know, some of those, you know, Tom's sports and political events, he's the problem code. Flagrant for you, welcome bonus, Al. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:08:01Speaker 06

  Based on everything you're saying, we need to ask you about Israel, we need to ask you about Big Beautiful Bill. But before that, based on everything you're saying, we can't have too many immigrants coming in too quickly, there are loopholes that get exploited, how do you feel about ending birthright citizenship?

• 1:08:15Speaker 05

  I think, look, I don't, I don't think birthright citizenship is some like, you know, hill I am willing to die on in that if you were to have a country that had some requirements based on it, like, okay, you're born in this country, but we also want to make sure X, Y, and Z, other countries have that. Yeah, European countries have that. Right. What I will say is because of the particular history of the United States, because of slavery and the Civil War. Yeah. It is in the Constitution. And I don't think it's, it's particularly ambiguous. It's pretty clearly written into the Constitution. And it's not, you know, it's not a area where I would be leading the charge for a constitutional amendment. I don't think we need it.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  We've survived 250 years pretty well with it in there.

• 1:09:01Speaker 06

  But we're getting too many immigrants too quickly.

• 1:09:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 06

  And there's a loophole that you can come here illegally, have a kid, kid is an American.

• 1:09:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  I'm not saying what I believe, but I'm asking you to see what you're saying.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  So what I'm saying is I would rather make sure through the processes I was saying, that you don't let the illegal, you know, immigrants in, rather than say, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna try and amend the Constitution and take out something that was, that has been pretty core to the United States, as opposed to just strengthening the border and making sure you change the asylum. If you change asylum, by the way, to be fair to Trump, he has shown that it's actually not so hard to stop border entry. Yeah, border entry is down to close to zero. Hmm. Right? So you don't have a problem with birthright citizenship now because you're not letting any, anybody in.

• 1:09:47Mark Gagnon?

  But why do we, why does it seem like people are so upset with the amount of immigrants here if it doesn't seem to be affecting the economy that much? Like, right now.

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  It helps the economy.

• 1:09:57Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, like unemployment is at record lows and I don't really hear people complaining that they can't get a job because some immigrant or migrant has that job that they want.

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  I think a lot of it is cultural. I do think a lot of it is cultural. You know, people, as, as we were talking about, the places that have the immigrants don't, don't seem to mind. It's the places, you know, where do you feed the strongest anti-immigrant fervor? It literally is the places that have the lowest number of immigrants.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  Where their idea of America is one without immigrants.

• 1:10:28Mark Gagnon?

  Right.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  And the places where your idea of New York is a city of immigrants. So it's not as shocking for us. Yeah, I don't, I don't see.

• 1:10:36Mark Gagnon?

  So don't we have to change how they feel and look at what America is?

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  Because.

• 1:10:40Mark Gagnon?

  No, because. America is a place where we're accepting of all different types of people.

• 1:10:43Speaker 04

  We should be accepting of their view of America too.

• 1:10:45Speaker 06

  I think you can meet them where they are, maybe a little bit where it's like, instead of you have to completely change how you think. Okay, we're still letting in America, we're still letting in immigrants. That is what America is founded on. Maybe we let them in a little bit slower and you can be upset about that if you want, but we need to.

• 1:10:58Speaker 05

  As I said, we still, you know, we've taken a million legal. I don't think anyone has any problem with that. And, and honestly, as a legal immigrant, I kind of resent the fact that people who, you know, who don't stand in line and don't do the things you're meant to do somehow, you know.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  Get ahead of the law.

• 1:11:14Speaker 05

  I think that, I think, you know, I went through a very, very long, complicated, painful process to, to become an American citizen.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  We gotta vet out the good ones, you know? To your, to your example, it might be similar to like what some people experience with gentrification of like a black neighborhood. Right? You know, when one white family moves in, it might not be that bad. This feeling that like tons of white people are moving into this area and like changing the fabric of that area, changing the culture of that area. You've heard a lot of people go, I don't really like this gentrification where all these white people moving in. You can understand that perspective, right?

• 1:11:48Mark Gagnon?

  Like I can see being a little bit upset about the change, but they're not like, kick them out.

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  But if, well, would you, hold on, would you say that on record? You don't think that they would say kick them out?

• 1:11:59Mark Gagnon?

  I mean, they're not protesting in front of white homes right now in Brooklyn's demanding him to leave.

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  Are they not?

• 1:12:08Mark Gagnon?

  No.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, maybe they're not, but you would agree that there is a sentiment that is against it.

• 1:12:13Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  And, and, and I guess what I would say is like, if we can understand that, then maybe you can understand the people from, we're going to use Montana as a placeholder, that also have that same sentiment. That these people coming in are changing like what our idea of our neighborhood and our community is.

• 1:12:27Mark Gagnon?

  Yes, and I, and I agree with that. And, but I think we have.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  You said, why don't we change their opinion?

• 1:12:32Mark Gagnon?

  No, I think we had the changing. Their opinion that like, hey, we're against all change. Like, change is going to be a difficult thing at times, but you have.

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  I think you're talking about extremes who are like, to Fareed's earlier point, who are like, we don't want legal immigration. I think they're talking about illegals, which is a pretty easy thing to get behind. Like, if somebody just came to a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, was just forced families out illegally. Nah, this is ours. We need asylum from whatever the fuck. You'd be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:13:00Mark Gagnon?

  Right.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  I just want to point that this is one of the reasons why I think our politics has gotten more polarized. Is that, you know, in the old days, when it was all about economics, you could always split the difference. Like, one side, one side wanted to spend a hundred billion dollars, the other side wanted to spend nothing. There's a number in between those. Fifty, let's make it. But when you talk about cultural issues, abortion, gay rights, immigration, these are all kind of like, they feel very much like they're about values.

• 1:13:26Mark Gagnon?

  Yep.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  It's very hard to compromise this. And that's where we are. And it's not just America. I think all over the Western world, it's like we've moved up Maslow's hierarchy so much.

• 1:13:36Mark Gagnon?

  What is that?

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  Maslow has a hierarchy of needs, which was like, when you start out in life, you need basic physical needs, material needs.

• 1:13:44Mark Gagnon?

  I need Wi-Fi.

• 1:13:46Speaker 05

  And his final one, which I think is really interesting, is self-actualization. Like, we want to feel like we are doing the thing we were meant to do in life. We have purpose, we have dignity. And when it starts to become about all those things, it's very hard to compromise. Those issues are so amorphous, you know?

• 1:14:05Speaker 04

  Okay, let's talk about the world. We've just been talking about America. We got a geopolitical expert right here.

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  That's what happens in America.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  We just care about ourselves, right? But that's every country. Like, every time I go to a different place, it's like, they're not concerned about anybody besides themselves. I don't know if there's anything wrong with that. I don't even think that that's like.

• 1:14:21Speaker 05

  We're particularly bad, not bad, but big countries generally are like that in particular, right? Like, people will say to me, oh, nobody in America speaks another language. Yeah, you know, but go to Russia, they speak Russian. Go to China, they speak Chinese. Now, if you go to Europe, yeah, they speak a lot of languages.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  They have to.

• 1:14:38Speaker 05

  Well, because you drive one hour and you're in another country, right?

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  I hate that they act like there's some sophistication with this.

• 1:14:43Speaker 05

  I mean, you drive three hours here, you're still in the same Iowa cornfield, right? No, there's anything wrong with that.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  Okay, so let's, uh, okay, so let's, tell me about, uh, the recent, uh, I don't even know if I would call it diplomacy, but. Everything that happened with Iran, are you privy to what had happened? Like, did we blow up the nuke site or what? Like, why is there so much disinformation here?

• 1:15:06Speaker 05

  So, it's pretty hard to tell because the Iranians won't like let you in and say, "By the way, here's the damages." I think, my guess is, we did a lot of damage. Those are huge bombs. Nuclear facilities, nuclear enrichment facilities, need structurally stable environments. They need continuous power supply. That's a very important piece of this. So if you cut the power supply through all this bombing, the centrifuges start malfunctioning. So it's very likely that there was a lot of damage. But the key thing to remember, and this is the point that the International Atomic Agency had said, they can rebuild. Because you can't bomb the knowledge out of there.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  And remember, nuclear technology is now 75 years old. This is not like cutting edge, you know?

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

  They're not making microchips.

• 1:15:59Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. This is like the world of transistor radios and television tubes and so on. The 1940s technology. Can they rebuild it? Sure. And so the real answer is going to be, you've got to come to some agreement with them. You've got to allow for monitoring and inspections. And that's the part where it feels like, you know, the Israelis don't want to do that because they want to just keep bombing them every now and then. And I don't think that's a stable situation for the Middle East. I don't think it's healthy. And I think what Trump should do now is say, "Look, I gave you guys a big thing you asked for, which was we use those bunker buster bombs. Now you get on board with some kind of deal where we come up with a monitoring system." We, you know, and I think it would stabilize the whole region.

• 1:16:43Speaker 05

  But, look, the Israelis have done, so if you're asking what is like the big story of the last five, seven years? The big story is, Israel has become the superpower of the Middle East. They have decided to take out all their enemies. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians, who are now so much weaker than they've ever been. They've been, they attacked the Syrian militias, which then led the... In part led the Syrian regime to collapse. So they've managed to put back this whole array of like militias that had been that had been kind of keeping them on edge, particularly Hezbollah. And they called the bluff. They went in. And part of it is Israel has just become so much stronger over the last 10 or 15 years.

• 1:17:26Speaker 05

  Their technology superpower, their military superpower, largely thanks to us. We provide the weaponry and the trading and we still give them a huge amount of military aid.

• 1:17:35Speaker 06

  This is interesting. You're saying Israel is a superpower, but every politician here seems to think they're the weakest, most helpless country. They're like really vicious.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  If they're such a superpower, why do they keep asking?

• 1:17:47Speaker 06

  Somalia in the 90s had no idea what rough living was.

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  So just ask yourself, like, look at that world and say to yourself, you know, look at what they've done to Hamas in Gaza. Look at what they did to Hezbollah. Look at what they did to Syria. Look at what they've done to the Iranians. Like, that's this one country, you know, with 7 million people. Yeah, the huge, huge support from the United States makes a difference, but they're also super inventive. The IDF, the military fights amazingly well. Look at the intelligence success of, you know, the Pedro operation.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  No question about the intelligence success.

• 1:18:23Speaker 05

  So that's the real story here. Now, the question is, what does that do? You know, for the Palestinians, it's a very sad story because what it means is the Israelis can just continue to pummel them in this way that feels to me completely beyond excessive. Like, there are reports that they may have killed 100,000 people in Gaza by now. It's somewhere between 50 and 100,000. Nobody knows, but there are Israeli reports that say it's in that range.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  I heard there's a lot of people that are missing.

• 1:18:52Speaker 05

  Well, so there was a report that came out by some.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  Hostages, as we're talking about, is missing.

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  No, no, no. But if you just look at Gaza, right, you look at the photographs. You don't have to be an expert, right? You look at it and there's no World War II city that looked like that at the end of the Allied bombing. So you say to yourself, like, Why do you have to do that?

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Why? What is your answer to that?

• 1:19:15Speaker 05

  I think that there is some combination of, you know, different things going on. There was a level element of vengeance, the sense of like October 7th, which was a brutal,

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  horrific terrorist attack.

• 1:19:27Speaker 05

  And, and, and it made Israelis think, oh my God, these people will never let us live in peace. These people always all want to kill. You know, I, I understand all that. But so some of it, I think is vengeance. Some of it is a Bibi Netanyahu feeling like this is my opportunity. And by the way, it allows him to stay in power because it's a wartime situation.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  That's kind of what it feels like.

• 1:19:48Speaker 05

  War time prime minister. But look at the price you're exacting on, on innocent people to do.

• 1:19:53Speaker 04

  I mean, the price you're exacting on some people. And also like this idea that this could potentially create more security for Israel. I don't know if that's necessarily true. I've never seen less support for Israel around the world, but especially in the United States. I don't know Americans outside American Jews that support what's happening right now.

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  And I think a lot of American Jews know in their heart that this is, this is not right.

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  They don't want to say it all.

• 1:20:17Speaker 05

  They're, you know, they're feeling defensive. There has been a rise of antisemitism in the country.

• 1:20:22Speaker 04

  That's, that's, that's absolute.

• 1:20:23Speaker 05

  So you can understand.

• 1:20:24Speaker 04

  And there was a lot that we didn't realize was there.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  But again, exactly. You scratched the surface and you found, you know, it's, it's, it's very sad. But, but I think that at the end of the day, even Israelis are going to look back on this.

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  And go, what the fuck?

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  What did we, you know, how could, how could we have allowed this to happen?

• 1:20:41Speaker 04

  So, so here's a question I have, right? Because like, I think what a lot of Americans are experiencing now that there's economic uncertainty at home is we hear these numbers going out to other countries, right? Like, I think that's why there is a, there was like a, the primal satisfaction to cutting USAID. Cause it was this idea that millions of dollars is no longer going around the world. It's going to stay home. Now, I don't know if it actually stays home, but to the average American, we're going to be, okay, well, now that I'm suffering, at least we're going to take care of us. And I think you, you see this a lot, especially with Ukraine and Russia. You saw it immediately, just the numbers, the amount of money going over there while Americans are struggling, right? We can't pay our healthcare bills. We're suffering with this, not even like, I'm talking about American debt.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  I'm talking about college loan debt, just credit card debt, whatever we have. Cost of living going up, rent going crazy high. And you hear like, Billions of dollars just going abroad. And we start to get this sentiment where it's just like billions of dollars going abroad, especially like to destroy Gaza, like just nothing left. And then we're going, what is, how does this affect us at all? Why are we supporting this when we're suffering at home? Why isn't that money coming home to make sure we're good? And then you start hearing these things that like, I think they got, they got healthcare in Israel, right? They got free college in Israel. Like, why don't you take the healthcare money and the college money and put it into the bombs before you ask us to give you money for the bomb? Like, we don't got healthcare, we don't got college.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  I think you can understand why there is this American resentment for money going away when we need it here, or at least it feels like it.

• 1:22:13Speaker 05

  And to me, it feels like there's a big difference between supporting, you know, the bombardment of Gaza and USAID helping AIDS people, you know, babies in Africa, right? I mean, I'm an unashamed supporter of USAID. I have traveled the world, I've seen these people. 60% of it was food and medicine. And yeah, we're the richest country in the history of the world, and I was always proud as an American that we were also the most generous country in the history of the world. We basically invented foreign aid. If you look at, you know, Elon Musk said he didn't, he didn't notice any effect of it. Well, I'm sorry of the, you know, the baby who's now going to get AIDS because the, you

• 1:22:56Speaker 05

  know, we stopped giving the medicine is not on Twitter complaining, but those are the people, those are the people who are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And it was a small amount of money, it's 1% of the federal budget. You know, most Americans, when they're polled and asked, what percent of American, but the American budget, do you think we spend on foreign aid? The average number people give is like 15% or something. And it's actually 1%, it's 1/15 of that. It's a small amount of money, you could trim it back some, but you know, that was, that was America at its best. Like, and, but you look at, you know, the bombing of Gaza, and yeah, I mean, why can't

• 1:23:35Speaker 05

  we, why can't we have the, the strength to say, look, we support you, we support your security, we do everything we can to support your security, but we think what you are now doing is actually hurting your security and it'll hurt your security in the long run.

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  Undoubtedly.

• 1:23:53Speaker 05

  For generations.

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  Undoubtedly, I mean, their security is dependent on US support.

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  If you don't have US support, I mean, I think it's not easy to do these missions that they do. Don't get me wrong, like it obviously needs sophisticated intelligence apparatus to execute them. But it must be nice knowing that no country can really slap you back too hard. Because daddy's over here. But at a certain point in time, if you don't have our support, which it doesn't feel like there is much American support, you're putting yourself in incredible-

• 1:24:22Speaker 05

  You think American support for Israel has dropped?

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  I think-

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  Who supports it?

• 1:24:26Speaker 06

  I know hardcore Republicans still-

• 1:24:28Speaker 04

  Outside of politicians?

• 1:24:29Speaker 06

  Hardcore Republicans, apparently, like 94%, that's like hardcore Republicans are in support of everything. Because they support everything. But I think a lot of the moderates, a lot of the left. I remember growing up, I just assumed Palestinians were like bad, because that's what the media would show me. And then I remembered in the last like 15 years, that kind of shifted. And now most left-wing people I know, completely pro-Palestine, most moderates I know, at least think what's happening is horrific. And then hardcore Republicans, I don't know many, but it seems like what I've, the polls I see, they're in favor. That's it.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just think that like if you were, if you were looking out for the long-term success and safety of Israel, if that was your main concern, you would make sure that you wanted to foster the most nurturing relationship between, allegedly our greatest ally. I think that-

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  And make sure it's bipartisan, right?

• 1:25:16Speaker 04

  That's, that's the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand, is like, and I was talking to Barry Weiss about this, I wonder, I was like, I don't think Americans know, like we hear like Israel's our greatest ally. We get why we are to them, there's no question, right? Like, there's never been a greater friend in the history of the world. What I don't think Americans get, and I think that this, the burden of this is on Israel, is to communicate to Americans what we get. And it can't just be like, oh, military intelligence, it's like, okay, well, we give you billions of dollars a year to develop it, so we pay for that. Like, what are you doing for us? And it's on them to explain that. And if you don't explain that, then it will feel like a one-sided relationship, and you can't be upset at Americans who are hurting right now. That feel like money is going out there and they feel like politicians are kind of like, you saw Ted Cruz on Tucker.

• 1:26:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 04

  You know, like you just seemingly like, oh, well, Genesis said so.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:06Speaker 04

  Like, that's your justification because Genesis said so? Well, not all of us believe everything in Genesis. Like, what do you say to that? Like, what can they? Do you know what their relationship is? Do you know what they give America? Like, what we're getting out of this?

• 1:26:19Speaker 05

  There's no question. It's asymmetrical. We're giving them way more than they're there. But I think, look.

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  What are they giving? Like, is there a thing? Like, I've yet to, for anybody to tell me a, an, a, an exact thing that we get. Tangible thing. Yeah, like, intelligence? Okay, like, but give me a thing. I'm not a foothold in the region.

• 1:26:36Speaker 05

  Right, it's a pro American, it's a pro American state.

• 1:26:38Speaker 04

  We have Saudi now, we have Qatar, we have so many other footholds, like.

• 1:26:41Speaker 05

  But I mean, another way to say what, what you're saying is the long-term security of Israel surely is going to be enhanced more than anything else by not having a situation where you've got, you know, millions and millions of Palestinians living in your country who, who have no political rights. Like, how can that be a recipe for stability in the long run? Right? Like, I, when I look at even Netanyahu, who's brilliant at, you know, the external maneuvering, he's done a brilliant job with Hezbollah and all that. Like, what about this? Like, you've got five million people in your country who you refuse to give political rights. And, yeah, I understand, there's problems, there's bad leadership and all that, but what is your plan? What is your solution to this? Right?

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  You just kick the can down the road?

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  Hamas is horrible.

• 1:27:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  Nobody questions it. Disgusting, awful.

• 1:27:30Speaker 05

  But you've got, you know, like, you're just gonna keep kicking the can down the road and hoping people won't notice that five million will become six million or become seven million people who don't have any political rights and no, you know, no country, no, that just seems to me to be the biggest existential problem for Israel. Because one day, you just know it's going to explode.

• 1:27:51Speaker 04

  It feels like it's exploded.

• 1:27:53Speaker 07

  Do you believe in the the greater Judea ideology? And do you think that that plays a role in the politics within Israel and like the high brass of Israeli government? I like this idea of like trying to basically recreate the Israel of the Old Testament and basically from Tigris to the Euphrates, take all of that land.

• 1:28:11Speaker 05

  Right, so there's no question that that is a view held by some people in Israel on the right who have grown in power. Like, they say it openly. You know, ironically, the phrase "from the river to the sea," the most dangerous use of it right now in Israel is by these Israeli right-wingers who say, "We want all of Israel from the river to the sea, and we're gonna kick the Palestinians out to Libya," or to Egypt or places like that. And Netanyahu is allied with these people. I think it's a minority view in Israel. I think that the mainstream understands that you can't do that. You know, that would be the ethnic cleansing of five, six million people. But there's definitely a group of people who say that, and they're doing it piecemeal

• 1:28:55Speaker 05

  by, don't just look at what's happening in Gaza, look at what's happening in the West Bank.

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  They expand.

• 1:29:00Speaker 05

  These land confiscations, these expansion. You know, they've they've got it to the point where one village after the other, the Palestinians, they lose their land, they lose the water supply, they lose their, and they, life becomes unlivable. And that is, you know, it feels to me like that is a kind of, you don't forget what they're saying, look at their actions, the actions represent.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  That's the thing, like, how can we, in good faith, believe that this is just because Hamas is this terrorist organization, when in the West Bank, there are these continuous expansions? Like, you would you would assume that you would make the West Bank a Palestinian paradise just to prove that your intentions were for a two-state solution. But when you continue to expand the place that doesn't have Hamas. I think you lose some credibility in that argument.

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, Trump has a big opportunity, honestly, because he's so trusted by the Israelis. And if he wanted to and he were willing to spend some political capital, he could demand, he could say, we're going to have a two-state solution, it's going to be, you know, and, and maybe you say, okay, it's initially a demilitarized state or something like that, right? You know, that Costa Rica is a demilitarized state, maybe, and maybe that's a start because it's better than the hell that is there now.

• 1:30:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  But he would have to pay political capital. And by the way, if he did it, that is his one shot at the one thing that he really wants.

• 1:30:18Speaker 04

  He wants the fucking Nobel Peace Prize, it's like right there.

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  You know, but use your, use your political capital.

• 1:30:23Speaker 04

  What does that mean, use political capital?

• 1:30:25Speaker 05

  Means, means be willing to do unpopular things because people are going to trust your, your, you know, they, they think you have, he has credibility with the Israeli right.

• 1:30:37Speaker 06

  Cash in a little of your credibility with Israel. Look, I've been there for you.

• 1:30:40Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:30:40Speaker 06

  Do this for me?

• 1:30:41Speaker 04

  I supported the hell out of you, you owe me one.

• 1:30:43Speaker 06

  But it doesn't seem like he's doing that at all.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:30:45Speaker 06

  It seems like this.

• 1:30:46Speaker 05

  No, he was pandering, even, even in that meeting with, you know.

• 1:30:49Speaker 06

  He called him one of the greatest men on earth or something like that.

• 1:30:51Mark Gagnon?

  It seems like the world wants this, except Israel. Like, it seems like the world wants a two-state solution, except there's Israel.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  Now, to be fair, just to remind everybody, two Israeli prime ministers tried very hard and Palestinians rejected it.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  And that's all real and that history has, has moved Israelis to the right. And that's part of the problem. But, you know, you don't get to just stop trying because, because then, well, you know, when you have a problem like this.

• 1:31:16Speaker 04

  I also think there's another component that's very important, which is like Iran sponsoring of terror in the region.

• 1:31:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  And again, I know nothing, this is why you're here. But it seems to me the lack of involvement of the other Arab states might be indicative of them supporting the downsized influence of Iran in the region. In other words, if I'm Saudi, if I'm, you know, UAE, it's like, I want to turn this into Las Vegas. I want this to be like a fun place where people go vacation. They're not going to do that if there's going to be the Houthis that are shooting bombs over here and all these other terror proxies of Iran. So is there a version where they're just kind of like letting? Israel do the job to secure the

• 1:31:57Speaker 05

  They were. So I think the Iranians had a very clever strategy, which is they knew they were not very strong, particularly up against Israel with American support, right? So they came up with this strategy, asymmetrical strategy. We're going to fund these little militias, you know, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Syrian militias, the Iraqi militias. And we're going to keep Israel and Saudi Arabia and all kind of the American, we're going to keep them on edge. We're going to keep them, you know, they're always going to be a little worried about what could happen. And that's why I say what the Israelis did over the last few years has completely changed that strategic situation because they decided in a way, October 7th, I think, kind of freed them up and said, we're just going to, we're going to go for it.

• 1:32:40Speaker 05

  We're going to take, and they went after them one after the other. And it turned out they were all weaker than people thought. The Israelis were stronger. They had our support. So that whole balance of power has completely shifted. Iran is now much weaker. Its militias are basically decimated. And the interesting question is that the Saudis and the Gulf states, that you're absolutely right, were very happy to have Israel take care of business. And now watching an Israel that has become the superpower.

• 1:33:09Speaker 04

  And now they go.

• 1:33:10Speaker 05

  And you wonder what they, you know, this is like classic balance of power politics where well, one, one, now the Iranians are so weak, they don't care that much about Iran. But I wonder whether they're looking and saying, has Israel got too strong? Do we, you know, do we want to live in a Middle East so dominated by this one country? Or, you know, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're also kind of like trying to ask themselves, what does this mean? You know, it's a kind of, the Middle East of today is basically dominated by Israel, Saudi Arabia, just, you know, in certain ways Saudi money and Turkey. And those are the three, the others are all knocked out.

• 1:33:48Speaker 04

  Flare it. Could you see a future where, you know, Israel becomes the hegemon of the region? And they kind of push American influence out, like basically create distance with the American government? Is that possible for the Israelis to do?

• 1:34:02Speaker 05

  Not really. The Israelis so depend on American military hardware. And, you know, there's an interesting thing that's happened with the world of software, where it used to be you sold somebody a plane, a military, you know, fighter jet. And it was theirs. And they would kind of run it and fix it. Nowadays, when you sell people complicated hardware, it's all got software that needs to be updated all the time.

• 1:34:26Speaker 04

  SaaS diplomacy.

• 1:34:27Speaker 05

  So you can, you can sell it to them, but you can turn the switch off.

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  Whenever you want.

• 1:34:31Speaker 05

  Two years later. This is one of the big challenges the Europeans are having, which is they're saying to themselves, we've relied, the basic deal the Europeans made with America was you protect us, in return, we'll buy a lot of your military hardware. And so that's what, what tends to happen. That's why when we say we've given all this money to Ukraine, it's, I mean, 90% of American aid to Ukraine has come back to American defense contractors. But now the Europeans are saying is, suppose we buy all your stuff and we think we have to go to war with Putin. And President Trump says Putin is my best friend. You can't go to war with him. I'm going to turn off the software updates.

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  Then we're stuck with these F-35s that we paid hundreds of millions of dollars for, but the Americans have cut off the.

• 1:35:19Speaker 04

  Incredibly vulnerable.

• 1:35:20Speaker 05

  So they're beginning to say, we need to have our own defense industrial base. We need to have our own defense industry. And one of the effects of Trump's warring with the Europeans is going to be the creation of a European defense industrial base. It'll take a while, but believe me, the Germans know how to build weapons. This is not, this is not like, you know.

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  But that's a good point. That goes right back to what you were saying about the importance of having these allies, because it allows you to outsource certain things. And once you create a system where they can no longer rely on you for certain goods, they might be military goods, especially if they're goods that ensure their, their survival, they will be forced to rely on themselves.

• 1:35:59Speaker 07

  Well, this is what I wonder about with Israel. Like, if they're able to neuter the militias in the region and all of their adversaries in that part of the world, and they're able to then take on contracts with other countries, is it possible that they can decentralize the reliance on the American empire?

• 1:36:14Speaker 05

  They could go a little bit less, but they're too small a country to have a real defense industrial base. You know, I mean, you're talking about a few million people. The big defense manufacturing bases tend to be in places like the United States, China, Russia. You need to be a size and scale. So I doubt it. I also think, you know, we own the skies in a way that nobody does. The Chinese will probably rival us in the near future. But why do the Israelis have all this amazing intelligence? They're amazingly good, but they are able to get all American satellite intelligence. We provide all that stuff to them, the real-time targeting of all these Iranian sites.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  How did they have the pinpoint accuracy that?

• 1:37:00Speaker 07

  Oh, that's our stuff? Why are we giving them all this credit?

• 1:37:03Speaker 05

  We own the skies. We are, I mean, it's amazing how comprehensive American, you know, America's view of the world is, because we have these satellites all over the, we map every square inch of the world, and we know exactly where stuff is. We can see tank movements in ways that almost no other country can.

• 1:37:22Speaker 07

  Is that all our satellites, or is that a combination with, like, Starlink and allies?

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  It's all our satellites. It's all, and that stuff is all military. What Starlink was able to do, which was incredibly helpful to the Ukrainians, is the Russians basically brought down the Ukrainian cellular system, Wi-Fi system, you know, all that. And, you know, tank battalions need to communicate back and forth using cellular systems, Wi-Fi, all that. Starlink provides that for them. But it's not the satellite pictures, that stuff is all, that's US. And we give the Ukrainians that. Trump occasionally has paused it when he's, when, you know, when he gets into a bad mood about Zelensky, but we've usually given that stuff to them. We have, we've managed to play this incredibly important...

• 1:38:09Speaker 05

  Role in the world where we can, you know, provide this huge advantage to our friends. And again, you know, I just think sometimes we forget. We've we've built this amazing system where we are the hub of this whole system. These people rely on us, but pissing everybody off. Yeah, we're strong enough, we can strong arm them, we can arm twist them, we can squeeze them for a better deal. You know, but as any good businessman knows, the way you really build enduring businesses is not by squeezing people on every transaction, but by building relationships. You know, you build a web of relationships that causes trust, that causes continuous business. And and that's what we have.

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Is it possible for peace in that region? I imagine you either need, I guess, regime change in Iran, or you need the current regime to stop funding the terror in the region. You need Israel to stop turning Gaza into rubble. But it seems like there needs to be an agreement between Iran and Israel before there will be peace in the region.

• 1:39:18Speaker 05

  So a very good point. I think you're not going to get that right now because Iran doesn't even recognize Israel. But what you could get is a is an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And maybe Iran and the other moderate Gulf states, you know. Basically, you're right that you need an Iran to behave. Henry Kissinger had a great line, he said, Iran needs to decide, is it a cause or is it a country? And I was, is this a country that just wants like, we have our national interests, we need to be, we need to protect them. And, you know, they have legitimate interests. Or are you this cause Islamic, you know, revolution, you were funding proxies all over the world? If you cut that stuff out, and if you focus on your national interests and you say, we have these defensive concerns.

• 1:40:02Speaker 05

  That I think could allow for peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia with the United Arab Emirates. And then, you know, you build from there, maybe.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  So Iran doesn't necessarily have to recognize Israel, but if it is in good conversation with Saudi, Saudi could apply some pressure on Iran for Israel. To stop the proxies. And then when when Israel and Iran are not in this proxy war, the region is safer.

• 1:40:27Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  Economy can grow. Everyone wins. Iran gets his peace press.

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:40:32Speaker 04

  So maybe that's what.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that's that. And by the way, that that, you know, Saudi Arabia.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  The Israelis don't feel like a very real existential threat, which is like constantly, we don't know where.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  Correct, correct. Look, don't forget, Israel lives in a in a tough neighborhood. These countries have tried to go to have gone to war with it many times. They've tried to wipe it off the map. The, you know, the the Tom Friedman, I think, once said, he said, you got to remember three things about about Israel. One, it's an amazing country that built, you know, an incredible country out of the desert. Two, it can do really, really horrible things as it is doing now in Gaza. And three, in Gaza and the West Bank, I think he said, and three, it lives in a crazy neighborhood. Like, all three things are true at the same time, you know. But I think the other thing that's going for a more optimistic view of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia. We sometimes don't talk about like the good news.

• 1:41:22Speaker 05

  The good news is Saudi Arabia, which used to fund all the Islamic terrorism in the world. It used to fund all the Islamic fundamentalism in the world. I'm exaggerating, but it was it was a huge. You know, this is where the Bin Ladens of the world came from.

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  We used to have a couple of buildings downtown.

• 1:41:37Speaker 05

  Exactly. That's, you know, nineteen out of twenty of those guys, you know. Oh, sorry, fifteen out of twenty of them, I think, were Saudi. The four pilots, I think, were the leaders, were Egyptian, and the others were Saudi. So Saudi Arabia has been transformed. It's now a force for stability. They, you know, they're they're they have actually cracked down on all the Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism. Not just women's rights, but in many different ways, they've pulled back. They're trying to find ways to stabilize the situation, be more secular. Saudi Arabia basically wants to become Dubai.

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 05

  And that's a very, very powerful force for stability in the region. Because, as you said, they just want, maybe not Vegas, but they want peace, stability, tourism, trade, commerce. That's great.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  There's a there's a mafia saying, which is like, when we're at war, nobody's making. Money, something to that extent.

• 1:42:30Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  And like when the families are fighting, it's very hard to profit, right? You got the police looking after you, you got the FBI looking after you. When everybody's at peace, you can run your little racketeering thing, you can run your gambling thing over here. And it does seem to me that like peace in the region will will bring that. The question is, will the current regime in Iran allow for that to happen? But that's really interesting, using Saudi as the proxy for the peace negotiations. Even though there is like a, I think, a religious difference, right?

• 1:42:59Speaker 05

  There is a Sunni Shia, but they have actually started a rapporteuse. They've had, they've had foreign ministers have met, they've, they've gone back and forth. They've, again, this is all part of, and it was Saudi outreach that.

• 1:43:10Speaker 04

  This is, I mean, this is pretty, this is transformative.

• 1:43:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, because the Saudis, as you said, the Saudis want peace and stability. Because, you know, these countries, Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, they're now like, there's so much wealth has accumulated. They're like hedge funds with small countries attached to them. And what they're really thinking to themselves is, we need peace and stability to invest our money so that we can make a good return.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  You're 100% right.

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  And, and, you know, they're like, that is their perspective. They're almost like fund managers with huge pools of capital that need peace, stability and trade.

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  Is it possible to get Iran economically aligned in that way?

• 1:43:49Speaker 05

  Not with this regime, I think, and it's, and I worry about when people talk about regime change in Iran. Like, think about all our experiences of regime change in the Middle East.

• 1:43:58Speaker 04

  In Iran specifically.

• 1:44:00Speaker 05

  First of all, in Iran, you know, where we, when we've done it. But in general, like, these things have to come from within, you know, these transformations. Look, Iran historically is the most, of all of those countries, it was the one, it's the oldest trading state in the world in some ways. This is a very sophisticated, bazarri culture, but right down, they got a bunch of crazy mullahs running them. And, and I would say more, more than crazy, corrupt. Like, one of the things I noticed when I went to Tehran was the degree to which you didn't realize. The people at the top actually like the sanctions, because guess who does all the smuggling? Guess who, guess who benefits?

• 1:44:39Speaker 05

  From like, so you take all the sanctions down, you take all the, guess what it means for the Revolutionary Guard and for the mullahs? It means competition. All of a sudden, every businessman in Iran, and there are a lot of businessmen in Iran, they're gonna get in on the import action, they're gonna get in on the export action. Right now, so one of these guys, Rafsanjani, he cornered the entire market of pistachios. Iran is one of the great places in the world. There's whiskey, one family now that like, guess what? If you, if you had no sanctions, that, you know, the palm, you know, the, the, the Resniks in California who do the wonderful pistachios, they'd be in there.

• 1:45:17Speaker 04

  This is like, um, this is, this is Russia after the Perestroika.

• 1:45:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Speaker 04

  Right? Like, this is, yeah, there's a-

• 1:45:24Speaker 05

  Whenever you have controls, it means that somebody, because trade, capitalism has its way, it's gonna happen.

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  I was in Turkey and I'm, I'm right there on the Bosphorus and I'm seeing all these, uh, these boats come down. And there's this like beautiful, uh, castle. I was in Istanbul, like there's this beautiful, I'm forgetting the name of the castle, but it is like where the Ottoman Empire, you know, the, the, the sheik, where they, what are they, the sheik? No. The leaders of the Ottoman Empire, forget what they were called, what were they called? They're the king, but whatever their version is.

• 1:45:51Speaker 05

  Maybe I'm trying to remember. Yeah, the Sultan is the Ottoman, yeah, exactly.

• 1:45:55Speaker 04

  And, um-

• 1:45:56Speaker 05

  Oh, I know the one you mean, the Dome of Bachi Palace, right on the, on the water.

• 1:45:59Speaker 04

  And, uh, there's all these ships coming down and they're blank ships. And our tour guide was like, you see those ships? Yeah, that's Russian oil.

• 1:46:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  It's like, the oil's gonna get there. There are sanctions, but you're gonna strip the color, there's no flag flying and it's gonna go. And all that is consolidated at the top. That's such an interesting, uh, like, almost like, uh, how markets are gonna decide themselves no matter what.

• 1:46:20Speaker 05

  There's a, there's a, the Russian oil goes to the, goes to India and then when they get refined, I was talking to a guy who works at the refinery. He was like, look, once it's come to our refinery, it's Indian oil.

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  Okay, so, so Turkey is an interesting example of this because Erdogan has this like, uh, stranglehold of power, right? And my understanding is that like Erdogan just gets a piece of everything, like off the top, right? He's, he's, it's run like a mafia state, like-

• 1:46:47Speaker 05

  So those are the rumors. I think it's more his side. Son-in-law, as always happens in these situations, the person on top is like, I'm clean.

• 1:46:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:46:54Speaker 05

  My son-in-law, you gotta talk to him if you wanna get business.

• 1:46:56Speaker 04

  Who did that in our country?

• 1:47:00Speaker 04

  Was there an old guy that did that? Anyway, but uh, okay, so, but maybe it takes a kind of, I guess, strong man leader like that in a way to organize a system that can thrive. So like, maybe that is kind of what Iran needs.

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  Well, you know, the, the case of Turkey is very sad because the Turks were moving very, modernizing very rapidly. They were on a fast track to European Union membership and all this. And then Erdogan comes in and I don't think he ever wanted that future for Turkey. He wanted it to be much more. So Turkey's actually in many ways gone backwards. Like, what really modernized Turkey over the last 20, 25 years was the prospect of European Union membership. And Erdogan, and partly the Europeans screwed things up by saying, you'll never get membership because you're Muslim, you're a Muslim country.

• 1:47:49Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 1:47:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:50Speaker 04

  But they're a secular Muslim.

• 1:47:52Speaker 05

  Exactly. And, and I think it would've been possible to at least have some kind of associate membership or something like that. But by turning them down so dramatically, it, it made them turn east rather than west. And, and Erdogan kind of wanted that. He always wanted, you know, he's always more. And he, most of these places, I think what we don't understand sometimes is the religion is sometimes a charade. It's not completely a charade, but this is a power, these guys are power hungry. They want power. Look at the Syrian guy, okay? This Syrian guy was like right of, he was to the right of al-Qaeda. These people were like hardcore Islamic, you know, fundamentally, where the minute he gets into power, he's like,

• 1:48:34Speaker 05

  I want trade, I want commerce, I want to have good relations with America. And by the way, he signaled he's open to relations with Israel.

• 1:48:42Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:48:42Speaker 05

  Because, you know, and, and he wants power. It turned out, he thought 20 years ago, he thought the way to power, power was to be an Islamic revolutionary. Now he thinks the way to be power is a pro-American, pro-Saudi modernizer.

• 1:48:57Speaker 04

  He's right.

• 1:48:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, but these guys. You know, I mean, that just tells you like, don't be, don't believe too much in all these guys are going to want, they want martyrdom. You know, people say that about Iran. I'm like, if these guys want martyrdom, why are they building up these huge bank accounts in Dubai? Like, that's not gonna help them in heaven, right? That's gonna help them and their families for, for their lives now and their kids' lives now.

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  So maybe that, maybe you can use that against them. Like, maybe if we know that's what they need, then you have to show them that the pathway to power is through better relationships with the countries around them.

• 1:49:31Speaker 05

  So one of the hardest things about our relations with Iran, I think you're exactly right in thinking along these lines, which is, look, we need to be very tough on them in terms of no, no, none of these proxies, militias, you know, terrorists. But if you do all the right things, there has to be an upside for them, right? And so every time we talk about the upside, people are like, you're, you're giving them money, you're funding. First of all, it's all their oil money.

• 1:49:55Speaker 04

  We're gonna give you back your money.

• 1:49:57Speaker 05

  It's like, but, but secondly, how can you have a negotiation where you say to them, do everything we tell you do?

• 1:50:03Speaker 04

  And you get nothing.

• 1:50:04Speaker 05

  And you get nothing. It's like, okay, why would, why would I do all the things that you want me to do then if I get nothing for it?

• 1:50:10Speaker 04

  This is the tricky thing about geopolitics is because you're operating with people who say things that they might not mean, but they're the things that they believe will keep them in power. But you, the things that they say that they might not mean are terrifying to people. So if they say that they're gonna, death to America, like, I'm taking that shit serious.

• 1:50:29Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:50:29Speaker 04

  I don't even know if they could reach America. But if you say death to America, I'm taking that serious. If I, if I'm Israeli and somebody says death to, I'm taking that shit serious. You can't, you can't begrudge people for taking threats seriously. While at the same time, if you are some form of like a geopolitical diplomat or negotiator, you have to know that what they really want, hopefully, or best case scenario, is power, just like the leader of Syria right now. And to, to, to assure their power will not be thwarted. And it's very difficult to trust, I would imagine, America in that because we have thwarted it so many times in the past. Oof, that's a.

• 1:51:05Speaker 05

  You put it very well. Like, think about even during the Cold War, you know, you'd have like these Soviet guys who'd. Say, we believe in worldwide communist revolution, the destruction of every capitalist society in the world, this side and the other. And then they'd sit down and say, okay, can we work, can we make a trade deal? Can we, can we make a nuclear arms deal? Like, you know, they're, they're, they're operating at two levels. Like, some of that is being said, but maybe some part of it, they believe. Some of it is for domestic legitimacy. That's what makes them feel like they're, you know, holding up the, the, but part of it is a negotiating leverage, like they're, you know. But at the other, there's another practical level at which we did make deals with the, you know, with the Soviets. We, we had an arms control system that really stabilized the world so that we knew we're not gonna go into a nuclear war.

• 1:51:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 05

  Like, and that happened with these same guys who were saying, you know, our goal is to completely destroy you.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  Can I ask you a question, like geopolitically? Like, when you're negotiating with a country that has a dictator who doesn't have term limits and you strike a deal, is there a world where, like, you can trust the longevity of that deal more than striking a deal with a president who only has a four-year term? And the next administration could just undercut that deal?

• 1:52:19Speaker 05

  So, for sure, which is one of the reasons why, for example, the Saudis, one of the things they've been holding out for in terms of this normalization with Israel, like, deal. They said, we don't want just an executive agreement like the Iran nuclear deal. So they noticed that the Iran nuclear deal, the weakness was that a president could pull it. They said, we want a Senate-confirmed treaty.

• 1:52:40Speaker 04

  That's interesting.

• 1:52:41Speaker 05

  Right, which is, which, which, by the way, a president cannot unilaterally abrogate. So, so they

• 1:52:46Speaker 04

  I think that's smart.

• 1:52:47Speaker 05

  They understood that, right, they understood that. And look, it, it hurts us more when you have an administration to administration, like, massive change in policy. Like, look at the, the Trump. He pulled out of the Iran deal. And as I said, you kind of look at the situation now. He's gonna have to, if he wants to stabilize the situation, he's gonna have to make another deal. By the way, it won't be that different from the, the original one. But I will say this, you know, people always think that because we're a democracy and we're messy and we're chaotic in foreign policy, the other side has the advantage. Because they're dictatorships and they have long-term view and people say that about the Chinese now. I don't buy it. Look, we were up against the Nazis, we defeated them. We were up against the Soviets, we defeated them.

• 1:53:31Speaker 05

  We were up against Al Qaeda, we defeated it.

• 1:53:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Speaker 05

  You know, the truth is, we, and we are amazingly consistent, or you know, in general. We are still on the banks of the Rhine. Seventy-five years later, protecting Europe, we're still in Okinawa, protecting the Japanese. We're still on the DMZ, protecting the South Koreans. You know, we are the kind of crazy, you know, messy, complicated Americans. But we've kept our word in those places, you know. Halfway across the world, we have our boys and, and, and women protecting those countries. We have not reneged on any of those commitments. I think we do a much better job than we give ourselves credit for.

• 1:54:14Speaker 04

  Now, I, I agree with you, and it's also just because we're just superior Americans.

• 1:54:19Speaker 04

  But something about when you immigrate here from another country, it makes you better. But I, I do think there's something interesting about this that lends itself to conspiracy a bit. In that, in order to have these like long-term goals. It would be much easier to have a, and I hate this term, but like a deep state. And I think this is where like the American populace might start thinking like. Well, is there a group of people within the country that are not necessarily elected officials that are plotting the course of America? And you, I, I don't want to make an argument for the deep state here, but like, one might say. That having that would maintain stability in our geopolitical process.

• 1:55:02Speaker 04

  Even if it goes against the interests of Americans.

• 1:55:06Speaker 05

  So I think you're raising a really interesting point. For the continuity, for, for, for stability, for professionalism and expertise. It is important to have some group of people who are on a, you know, conducting things, whether it's in economic policy and foreign policy. But the thing to always remember is, we have a very large, very powerful. Elected layer on top of that that can change it anytime they want. And as Donald Trump is demonstrating, you can change all of that if you want to, right? And if you feel like you want to rip the whole thing up and you want to completely stop giving foreign aid to poor people all over the world, you can do it tomorrow and it shuts down.

• 1:55:49Speaker 05

  Like, you know, those offices are dead, they're empty, those people, you know, those poor people, Americans who've been, you know, were living in Ghana trying to help Malian nutrition, they're gone, they're like that's, and it's all gone in a hundred days, right?

• 1:56:03Mark Gagnon?

  Does that affect our relationship with these countries?

• 1:56:05Speaker 05

  Of course, I think, and look, it affects it also in like, we've always been the good guys. I mean, and that's, I think, no matter what you hear about anti-Americanism around the world, as somebody who grew up, everybody knew the Americans were the good guys. Everybody knew that if you were trying to figure out how to grow your crops better, how to irrigate your, the country you went to was the United States. The people who would give you the money, the know-how, nobody thinks the Chinese will do that. They think the Chinese will do it in a totally self-interested way to help the Chinese. Whereas we, you know, we have, we've always had this, this sort of reputation for being willing to, to help the world rise up along with us. Even our trade policy was part of that.

• 1:56:48Speaker 05

  So, you know, it's like, why are we screwing up something like that for 1% of the federal budget?

• 1:56:54Mark Gagnon?

  It just seemed like.

• 1:56:55Speaker 04

  Could I use the bathroom real quick?

• 1:56:56Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:56:56Speaker 04

  Do you have to use the bathroom?

• 1:56:58Speaker 05

  I'm good.

• 1:56:58Speaker 04

  I gotta use the bathroom, but I don't want to miss out on this. I'm like really interested in this conversation.

• 1:57:02Speaker 05

  This is one of the big tests that used to take place in international diplomacy.

• 1:57:06Speaker 04

  Which was who pays first?

• 1:57:07Speaker 05

  Who can, who can stay?

• 1:57:08Speaker 04

  You win.

• 1:57:11Speaker 05

  He went to the bathroom three or four times before every negotiation session.

• 1:57:16Mark Gagnon?

  Because kind of looked at as a Christian country. And usually, like you were saying, like, we would do these nice gestures for people. But it seems like when Doge came and we wanted, people just wanted to see some cuts. Like, I don't see too many people upset about the US aid cuts as they should be. So it's like, it's like contradictory for.

• 1:57:37Speaker 05

  You're right, you're right. It surprised me as well, because I thought people would realize. You know, how small amount of money it was, how much good it was doing.

• 1:57:47Speaker 06

  I don't think that information got out.

• 1:57:48Speaker 05

  I think and a lot of people, you know, a lot of it got mischaracterized very easily. And it was like, first of all, there was almost no waste for fraud or abuse found. Almost everything that the people around Doge said, including Elon Musk, these were programs they didn't like. You know, it's like, we found a, you know, gay theater in Ireland being performed, being, being supported. Okay, you won the election, you want to, you want to kill the program, kill the program.

• 1:58:15Speaker 06

  It was also $10,000.

• 1:58:16Speaker 05

  Right, but there was no fraud, like they, they gave the money, they performed the show. Like similarly, or they were like, there were condoms being given to Gaza, where it turned out it was condoms to the Gaza province of Mozambique. That has a huge AIDS problem and one of the most effective, cheap ways to deal with AIDS is to make people wear condoms. And that was why it was being given, right? So almost every one of those cases, there was no fraud, there was no corruption, there was no waste. These were just programs they knew that if they characterized in a certain way, Americans would say, I don't want to support this. Or why are we giving money to foreigners? And so it was very sad because it was easy to, it was easy to mischaracterize, it was easy to. But the whole Doge experience was a fiasco.

• 1:59:01Speaker 05

  It wasn't just, it wasn't just the USAID part. I mean, and I think what happened is that my own theory is that Musk goes in, he realizes there isn't the $2 trillion. He thought he was going to be able to easily cut. And so he picks on what he knows is the most easiest target. What is the thing most Americans are resentful of, or why do we spend money on foreigners? So even though it was a tiny part of the budget, it was low hanging fruit. You go for it, you, you mischaracterize it. And you know, the thing I, I, I think I most resent is, okay, if you're going to get rid of it, for whatever your reasons. Why call these people who work there criminals, corrupt, most, you know? Like, these are literally people going in for no money.

• 1:59:46Speaker 05

  They're spending their lives trying to figure out, how do you get nutrition to a poor country in Africa? How do you cure disease in a? Poor country in Asia. They've devoted their lives to this for seventy thousand bucks a year. They're not, you know, they're not getting rich on it. And to characterize them as criminals and mercenaries to yank them and say them, you know, in three days, you've got to get back. These are people with kids in schools in these places.

• 2:00:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:10Speaker 05

  I thought that was shameful.

• 2:00:11Speaker 06

  I think you're actually, you have a kinder view of Elon Musk's initial intentions than I do. I think he just wanted to be in power in the government. I don't, I do think there's a lot of bloat in government spending that you could probably cut. And it didn't seem like he attacked any of that stuff.

• 2:00:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  And I do think, the theory I have is Vivek was more purist about it. And I'm obviously supportive of him because he's brown. But that's it. But I think he was more of a purist about wanting to have some of that waste. And I think Elon and Trump were like, no, we're not doing that. We're picking and choosing.

• 2:00:40Speaker 05

  So Vivek, I think you're exactly, Vivek understood, I think I really understands the government. And he understood what, you know, the legal changes you need to make. I think Elon went in and he was like, what he does with every company is like, cut the headcount. Get it down to that. But the problem is in the federal government, the money is not in the admin. It's, it's not in the people writing the checks. It's in the, the numbers on the checks.

• 2:01:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:01:05Speaker 05

  Right? It's like the money in social security is not in how many people you are at the central bureau. It's how much money you're sending out the door.

• 2:01:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Speaker 05

  It's same with Medicare, same with veterans benefits, right? So it's like the wrong model. It's like in a tech company, maybe you get rid of, you know, fifty percent of the programmers and you've, you've made big savings. The, the federal government is basically a check writing operation. Somebody once called it, somebody has once said, the, the federal government of the United States is an insurance company with an army. Those are the two things it does. It writes checks and it has a big army. And that's where the money is, like not in the people writing the checks.

• 2:01:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about. China and India.

• 2:01:49Speaker 06

  India, I have to ask.

• 2:01:50Speaker 04

  Let's talk about India. Let's talk about India first.

• 2:01:51Speaker 06

  So my first question, the BJP, you hear a lot from NRIs, meaning people who are Indian but not, didn't grow up in India.

• 2:02:00Speaker 04

  Non-resilient Indian.

• 2:02:01Speaker 06

  It is the party in power. It is Modi. Yeah, Modi. So we have a perception, growing up here, they're doing horrible things, whatever. I was in India during Operation Sindore, when they attacked Pakistan. And talking to people there, I was there on my own, I'm not interacting with my family. Most people go back, talk to their family, only head home. There is a lot more support there than I thought, than I understood. And I also know these are people living there every day, experiencing it every day, going through actual life there. And we just kind of put being Indian on as a costume and then make assessments. What are your thoughts on Modi, on the BJP, on how India is being governed, etc.?

• 2:02:37Speaker 05

  So India, I think, in a sweet spot, to begin with structurally. It's like, it's been doing reforms for 25 years. Those reforms are paying off. It's become a much more market-oriented, growth-oriented economy. You've unleashed Indian aspirations. Average person in India thinks he can move ahead. Amazing, I think it's an amazingly hopeful story of what's happening in India. And it's actually bipartisan. It's been going on across two changes of government is a good example of how democracy actually has strengthened the process because you've now had, you know, two different parties in power over 25 years.

• 2:03:14Speaker 04

  With continual growth.

• 2:03:14Speaker 05

  Still, still goes up. I think Modi has been a very effective economic manager. He has managed the economy very well. He hasn't done the biggest reforms. He's tried to do some of them, couldn't get through some, made mistakes. But basically, very competent, very hardworking. In foreign policy, he's navigated very well. The sweet spot again is for India, that it's not China, that it's a democracy. The Americans want to do deals with it. The Europeans want to do deals with it. The Russians still want to maintain relations. So he's handled all of that well. I think, however, when you look at the issue of two things, one, his

• 2:03:57Speaker 05

  Authoritarian tendencies and the treatment of Muslims in India, I think you'd have to give them a bad score. Courts in India are less independent than they used to be. The press in India is less independent than it used to be. In fact, it's almost there's almost no real, particularly in television, the really powerful independent press in India, which used to be very strong. You know, treatment of minorities, not just Muslims, you know, Christians, Buddhists. And this is not me. You look at any objective, you know, that three institutes around the world that raid democracies. And all three of them, Freedom House, the VDEM in Sweden, Freedom Mouse here, have actually put India

• 2:04:38Speaker 05

  in the category of almost a non-democracy because of the abuse of the rule of law, the abuse of minorities. So it's a complicated picture where like there are some very, very good things happening in India. There are some, there's a darker, there's an underbelly to it. Most of the people you're going to meet in India, just to remind you, are, you know, India is eighty-five percent Hindu.

• 2:05:00Speaker 06

  Hindu, yeah.

• 2:05:00Speaker 05

  And I think that it's also fair to say Modi is very popular. Like, this is not happening without public consent or anything like that. He's very, it's a lot more like Erdogan. You know, Erdogan is, whatever you may say, he's won three elections, right? And Modi has won two elections, you know, one of them very strongly, the last one, he got pulled back a certain amount. So it's, you know, it's like not all good things go together, but I'd say on the whole, India is moving, moving ahead in a very, in a very forceful way.

• 2:05:33Speaker 06

  So talking to people there, what I was told, you can tell me if this is true or not, the Congress party, which was in power before the BJP, would do the same kinds of things. The BJP seems to, if you go against them, they will ruin you. And I've heard the party in power before that, Congress would do the same thing, but because there was only television back then and no internet, no social media, we never knew about it. Because they could just do it, they controlled the television media, they controlled the newspapers, nobody's going to find out. Now with the internet, we can call out the BJP, but they've been doing that in India since its inception. That's what I was told.

• 2:06:03Speaker 05

  So like I said, that's why I'm better to rely On objective measures used by, you know, these independent uh think tanks that that rate countries on the basis of judicial independence, the number of court rulings that go against the government, the number of times of, you know, a judge who make who issues such a ruling is then transferred, you know, to like, you know, uh, you know, some kind of Wild West province like that. Those are the kind of things that they look at. I mean, media is very simple. There's very good data on all this where the the the basically Erdogan did the same thing in Turkey. There was one independent television channel in India that was really, I wouldn't even see

• 2:06:45Speaker 05

  anti government, anti BJP. It was very independent and would would call it as it saw it. They they decided to ruin it, to destroy it. They they they launched four income tax cases against it. Most people would argue these were bogus cases. The company was ruined. It was then brought down to brought to its knees and then Modi's favorite billionaire steps in and buys it. Adani? Adani. The TV channel was called NDTV. So Oh, yeah. Right? So so those are the kind of things. And you do it once. It's a good demonstration to

• 2:07:26Speaker 05

  to everybody else and everybody else falls in line. So but as I say, I don't I I think the truth about India is that it is doing on some dimensions is doing very extraordinarily well. And on some dimensions Modi is an extremely successful prime minister. But look, the BJP in its in its DNA has always had this very sectarian Yeah, you talk about populism, I would say India's, yeah. Right. So and and I mean, you know, to me, somebody like Erdogan or Orban in Hungary are very similar. Like, there's a there's a there's a path to power which has always been about saying,

• 2:08:06Speaker 05

  you know, I'm against the these secular urban elites and, you know, and all the the everything they represent. And those people, you know, the BJP would say is yeah, but the courts were full of these secular urban elites. The media was full of these guys hated us. We had to do something about it. You know, by the way, Trump does, there's a certain amount of that Trump is doing here as well. Right? Like, why, why are they trying to defund every NGO and every museum head? I mean, they're going after the Smithsonian. Like, who knew that, you know, there was something so bad about dinosaurs? It's like, there's a, there's an idea that that whole class of people are basically

• 2:08:49Speaker 05

  left-wing, you know, kind of resistors, and we've got to break them.

• 2:08:54Speaker 04

  I, I was seeing chatter, and I, I think that there might be American ignorance about when we were going through our little negotiations with China. I think a lot of Americans are like, hey, India is our homies. Like, why don't we just send all of our manufacturing over there? Is there a misunderstanding on how long it takes to develop efficient production lines? And how many years would it take to transition the, those production lines where we could send our manufacturing?

• 2:09:26Speaker 05

  Oh, it would be hugely complicated. To begin with, the biggest challenge would be China was unusually successful at being able to consolidate all this stuff. Think about all the countries it outcompeted to get all this stuff to be in China. And it's not just cheap labor, because there are countries that are cheaper labor than China. All of Africa, right? Like, why did it not all end up in Africa? So the Chinese were amazingly skillful and strategic and hardworking. And if you go to China, you go to these factories, they are mind-blowing. I mean, there, there's a level of scale and the technical expertise of doing it.

• 2:10:05Speaker 05

  Secondly, China, most people don't realize, because, you know, we, we now have this idea of China is all bad. That China opened itself up to the world a lot. So it lets in a lot of goods, it lets in a lot of competition. Its firms are very, very competitive and smart. And they don't have a lot of tariffs on intermediate goods. So we were talking about the iPhone, right? So one of the difficulties of moving iPhone production from China to India was the Chinese let all the component parts in with very low tariffs. India is actually the highest tariff country in the world. India and Brazil are the two most protectionist countries in the world.

• 2:10:43Speaker 04

  So when the parts come in, you're getting charged. And then when the phone comes out, you're getting charged.

• 2:10:46Speaker 05

  Right, so the India, so the cost, so Apple had to work out a special deal with India to get them to lower the cost of all the component parts that were coming in. So now India is competitive because it has low, but it hasn't lowered them for everybody. Right now, it's there, there's a kind of series of special deals. But that's what India needs to do. If India wants to really be the next China, it's got to open itself up more to the world, be less protectionist, let all these intermediate goods come in. Then you can start doing the manufacturing because manufacturing is a combination of manufacturing and assembly nowadays. It's not, so you've got to be able to bring in stuff cheaply. The other piece of this is the Chinese are really good at technical education.

• 2:11:31Speaker 05

  They have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these, I call them engineers, but they're really technicians who can do the things that you need to do to make an iPhone, to make, you know, to make machine parts, machine tools, to make cars, for example. The best Chinese EVs that BYD makes, they make for $10,000. Think about that, like you put a 50% tariff on that, that's still $15,000. You know, it's half the price of a Tesla, right? And they've, and they've.

• 2:12:01Speaker 04

  And why is that?

• 2:12:02Speaker 05

  They have brutal internal competition. They've, they, they manage, so these companies have gotten to the point where they're, they are amazingly efficient. There has been some state support, but by the way, we've also provided a lot of state support.

• 2:12:16Speaker 04

  Look at their centers for Tesla, yeah.

• 2:12:17Speaker 05

  Exactly, so it's a huge market, they're very, and they're very good. And as I said, they'll, they open themselves up much more than people realize to competition. You know, India has not done it that much, as much. They, they've not been able to move as far in some of these technical fields like batteries. The Chinese. Dominate battery production, they dominate solar panels, things like that, which are, you know, started out as technical fields where you have to understand it and then they they can scale in a way that nobody else can. But all of which is to answer your question, it's going to be very hard to move these supply chains. You can move some of them, you can win, and we should be trying, particularly in the areas that are national security concerns. But, you know, you have to,

• 2:13:02Speaker 05

  you have to admire what the Chinese did for their own people. They moved four to five hundred million people out of poverty in twenty five or thirty years.

• 2:13:11Speaker 04

  Why do I I see on Bloomberg once a month that the Chinese economy is falling apart? There's always some like fear based tweet or Instagram posts and it's like the Chinese economy is finally unraveling. And it's like, well, when when is that gonna happen? And what is that based on?

• 2:13:28Speaker 05

  So they face challenges. Look, every, you know, the truth is every economy face challenges. You can paint this however you want. They face real challenges. I'd say their biggest challenges are the three things. One, the thing that made China boom over the last thirty years was their embrace of the market and their embrace of trade and their embrace of competition. Xi Jinping clearly doesn't like all that because he thinks it undermines the party. And he's right. It undermines the role of the party, right? Jack Ma becomes more important than Xi Jinping.

• 2:13:59Speaker 04

  So he puts him in a basement for a month.

• 2:14:00Speaker 05

  He didn't like that for. So that's number one. Number two, they have accumulated a lot of debt. All these local governments have accumulated, and I don't think it's as, it's not like a cataclysmic thing because it's debt they owe themselves. You know what I mean? One arm of the government owes owes another arm of the, it's all denominated in their own currency. It's not borrowing in dollars or anything like that. But the third is demographics. You know, the one child policy meant that they, it's a good, fascinating example of like dictatorship. Dictatorships can execute bad policies very well, but also good policies well. But when you have a bad policy and you execute it too well, that's the one child policy.

• 2:14:41Speaker 04

  That's cute.

• 2:14:43Speaker 05

  By the way, India tried to do family planning also, but because it was like a messy. chaotic democracy never quite worked so India's demographics are now much better than China's because of their failure and China's success. But those three things you put them together it's a real challenge because you've got a you've got a regime that is a government that is less pro market than than it used to be. You've got a debt which constrains them and there's certain things they can't do. And the third is the demographics, which means they're going to have fewer workers and more retirees. But all that said, my own view is your skepticism is justified. They're going to be okay. They're going to be fine. They're going to be, you know, the second largest economy in the world.

• 2:15:27Speaker 05

  For a long time, they're going to have areas of incredible productivity like they dominate solar. They're going to dominate green and EVs and all that because we're cutting back on that stuff. So they're going to surge even further. They dominate batteries. Robotics, one out of every two robots made in the world is made in China. Okay, so and they're doing very well on AI. So the thing that I worry about is, yeah, there's going to be a mass economy that's maybe not as productive as we are. But at the top end, they're probably going to do really well at AI. And they're going to do really well at robotics and you put AI and robotics together. And do you need, do you still need as many people as you used to?

• 2:16:12Speaker 06

  Solves your one child policy.

• 2:16:13Speaker 05

  That may solve your one child policy, right? So they're going to be formidable competitor and my theory is always if you're in a race, don't hope the other guy is going to trip.

• 2:16:22Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:16:23Speaker 05

  You need to, you need to be, you need to be investing in yourself. We should be thinking to ourselves, what do we need to be doing to be competitive, to be world class in all these areas? That's why I'm all for be innovative, lean into the technology.

• 2:16:37Speaker 06

  How far behind are we in those areas? Is it, is it?

• 2:16:39Speaker 05

  AI, we're still way ahead. AI, there's no question we're ahead. There's an interesting question of does it matter that much because in AI every, it's like pixie dust, right? You're going to sprinkle it on everything. It's like the internet. Everyone can use it. Does it matter if some company is using deep seeks versus?

• 2:16:57Speaker 05

  Chat G P T. I don't know, but we are ahead. Um. In robotics, they're well ahead of us.

• 2:17:01Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:17:02Speaker 05

  In battery, they're well ahead of us. In green, they're well ahead of us.

• 2:17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06Speaker 05

  But, you know, there's a whole bunch of areas, nanotechnology, quantum, A I, where we're ahead. Um. There's a lot of biotech areas where we're ahead. I I look, we're we're the most advanced economy in the world. No question. Now, what has kept us in that place is this extraordinary combination of government funding, research being done by universities and the private sector using that research. And that triangle has been, it it really is, it's difficult to overestimate how important it's been because it's been, only America does it this way. The Europeans don't have this triangle the way we do. The Chinese don't. It's all government done. The Indians is all government done. So what we're screwing with with these attacks on Harvard, with these attacks on universities.

• 2:17:51Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 2:17:52Speaker 05

  Is that, and you know, weirdly, you're attacking by withdrawing funding from the research arm of these universities. The guys doing cutting edge computer physics, biology, medical research, they have nothing to do with those campus protests. I can tell you, having you know, spent a lot of time at universities, those scientists.

• 2:18:11Speaker 04

  They don't go fuck about what's going on.

• 2:18:13Speaker 05

  They're very non-political. They're they're like sitting in their labs trying to invent the dream of the future. And you just, yeah, and and the level of funding cuts is crazy.

• 2:18:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:23Speaker 05

  All these labs are being shut down. Literally, we have graduate students, the best graduate students were Chinese, who were hoping and dying to be in America. They're going back to China, to government-sponsored labs there.

• 2:18:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, with R I P.

• 2:18:37Speaker 05

  With R I P, with all our training, with all our the culture.

• 2:18:39Speaker 04

  Weren't they stealing secrets and bring it back? Didn't two get arrested?

• 2:18:42Speaker 05

  So there's some small percentage of Chinese-American graduate students were, I think, uh, involved in that.

• 2:18:49Speaker 04

  So we have to do something about that.

• 2:18:50Speaker 05

  The vast majority. Not only, you know, come here, they want to stay here.

• 2:18:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Speaker 05

  Like, there's a reason they're leaving China, you know? These are not people who are super happy with being in China.

• 2:19:03Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 2:19:04Speaker 05

  And if you look at our, our labs, if you look at our, uh, tech companies, if you look at biotech, it's all Chinese and Indian Americans, you know? These are immigrants who came here, went to the best universities, wanted to stay and have ended up, you know, doing cutting edge research or founding companies. So let's address the problem. You're a hundred percent right. There is some, some spying taking place, but we are, you know, we're very good at this. This is why we have huge organizations like the CIA to look into this. But let's not kill the goose that galeys the golden eggs. I mean, one of the things that keeps us cutting edge.

• 2:19:42Speaker 07

  The overcorrection.

• 2:19:43Speaker 05

  Right. Well, look, we get the, you know, I think Lee Kuan Yew, the ruler of Singapore, put it very well. He said, look, the Chinese can tap the best and brightest in their one billion people. The Americans step the best and brightest from the eight million, billion people all over the world. Let's, we want to be able to keep that.

• 2:20:00Speaker 07

  Let's keep doing that. What is the Chinese calculation when it comes to an invasion in Taiwan?

• 2:20:05Speaker 05

  Look, now, nobody knows, so your guess is as good as mine. But I think my, my sense is, first of all, this is not just a Xi Jinping thing. The Chinese have always wanted Taiwan. Unification of China and Taiwan is in the constitution of the People's Republic of China. It was, it's written into the constitution that that is going to be one of their goals. It is the unfinished part of the, of the communist revolution of 1949, that they have this, this piece of China that is not, you know, that is, that was the, the place where the, where the nationalists.

• 2:20:40Speaker 07

  The exiles.

• 2:20:41Speaker 05

  Escaped to, the exiles escaped to. Secondly, I think that Xi does believe that part of the kind of historical project that he wants to oversee is some kind of grand reunification. But. I think China is very different from Russia in this regard. Russia is a rogue regime. They like to insta- uh, cause instability around the world. Look at, you know, they're always doing it. Europe, even in the Middle East.

• 2:21:08Speaker 04

  Afghanistan.

• 2:21:09Speaker 05

  Afghanistan, right? And, and don't forget, how do they make money? Like, I always go back to the money. Russia, the Russian economy is basically an oil and natural gas economy, right? When you have instability, oil prices go up. So they actually don't mind instability. That, it's actually good for them.

• 2:21:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:25Speaker 05

  The Chinese are the opposite. They are, they are consumers, not producers of, of energy. They need stability. They need low prices. They need international commerce. They export to the world. They need open markets, you know? So they, I think, I think what deters Xi Jinping more than anything else is the fear that if he were to invade Taiwan, he would get cut off from all the markets of the world.

• 2:21:50Speaker 04

  And there goes his economy.

• 2:21:51Speaker 05

  And China's economy goes into it. So I think the, the biggest mistake we could make is to cut him off from all of that anyway.

• 2:21:59Speaker 04

  Because then he has no reason to not invade Taiwan.

• 2:22:02Speaker 05

  Then he's saying, I'm already being screwed by all these guys. The Americans are shutting me out of their market. They're decoupling from us technologically.

• 2:22:10Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:22:10Speaker 05

  I'm already in a fortress mentality.

• 2:22:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:22:13Speaker 05

  Why don't I, why don't I, you know, and I can't, my economy is doing badly because of that. Why don't I score a big win on Taiwan?

• 2:22:19Speaker 04

  Ideological reunification plus the semiconductors. And also, when the economy is doing bad, it's easier to galvanize the people. All these people want China to die. We're going to prove to them that we don't die. We can even expand.

• 2:22:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:22:30Speaker 04

  Wow, that's so interesting. So essentially coupling them, ensure, coupling with China will ensure the safety of Taiwan.

• 2:22:36Speaker 05

  To some degree, right? Like, that's the leverage we have with them. Without, don't, don't use up the leverage before, you know, like, now, the, the Taiwan semiconductors is a really interesting question. Is, you know, the 95% of the world's most advanced semiconductors are made in one place in Taiwan by, by the TSMC.

• 2:22:54Speaker 04

  Can you explain to the people what, and by the people, I mean me, what exactly a semiconductor does?

• 2:23:00Speaker 05

  Sure. So.

• 2:23:01Speaker 04

  Thank God you asked, because I've been.

• 2:23:03Speaker 05

  Because we hear these things all the time. And it's like, what exactly does it do? Like. So a semiconductor is a, it's a, it's a piece of machinery. It's like, you, you, you've heard about how with computers, everything is bits and bytes. Everything is, so everything is zeros and ones. So you're sending signals to, to, to take a language, for example, and turn it into zeros and ones. So how do you transmit that? How do you, how do you send that or store that? You have a machine that has little switches and the switch is either on or off. The on is a one, the off is a zero. And that is your mechanism. That is the code that you're sending across now.

• 2:23:45Speaker 05

  In order to, so you're thinking to yourself, well, we're sending a lot of stuff, right? Like, so that's why you need these massive, massive amounts of data to go, to be easily stored on tiny, tiny devices. So you, we developed these things called chips. And they're called semiconductors because they are neither on nor off. So they're in this semi-state. And the, each, each chip, each computer chip, which looks like it's the size of maybe a nail. It has hundreds of millions of these transistors or these switches on them that have been etched into them by, by these, that lithographic machine. I was talking to you about the Dutch machine.

• 2:24:28Speaker 05

  And so that's how you, you store information. So they're either memory chips or they're transmission chips, which are, you know, moving stuff around. So that's the heart of all computers, of every computer. And the highest end chips, the ones can, that can hold the most of this stuff are, you know, these things are now measured in nanometers, which is the, you know, like much, much thinner than a human hair. Those are only made by this one company in Taiwan.

• 2:24:57Speaker 04

  So it's a chip much thinner than a human hair.

• 2:25:00Speaker 05

  Holding hundreds of millions of these. Hundreds of millions, literally, I mean, billions. And it's like, it's mind blowing. These are the most complicated things human beings have ever done. And. This one company in Taiwan is able to make them at five nanometer, now three nanometer. Nobody else can do it. And it's really partly a kind of like mystery as to how do they, why is it like, what is the secret sauce? Nobody knows. Everyone has tried. And it's a combination of these engineers who've worked together forever. The best machinery, a culture in this firm that really is about, all about excellence. Pristine work environments like these environments have to be almost like vacuumed so that they're so.

• 2:25:44Speaker 04

  This is Nvidia you're talking about?

• 2:25:45Speaker 05

  No, this is TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor.

• 2:25:47Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 2:25:47Speaker 05

  Because they make the chips. So Nvidia designs the chips.

• 2:25:50Speaker 04

  And they're the ones who actually are putting them together.

• 2:25:52Speaker 05

  These are the guys who actually produce the chips.

• 2:25:54Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 2:25:54Speaker 05

  And so the argument is the Chinese will come in there because they want those. My own theory sense is you have an invasion of a country like Taiwan, which is, it's all it has is human capital. It's only human beings. There's no natural resource.

• 2:26:09Speaker 05

  First of all, I think the United States would bomb the factories and they would be rendered inoperable. But even if they didn't, like you wouldn't be able to do it anymore under some dictatorship. Because the engineers would emigrate, you know, they'd flee, they'd leave it, they'd be the new boat people. They, the guy, the CEO once explained to me exactly how each unit worked. And they're in continuous collaboration with like seven different countries that they have research centers. And ASML and Holland, which is the company that provides the lithography machines. You know, teams in the US, teams in Germany. Like he said, we're like the hub of a global system.

• 2:26:53Speaker 05

  If we got invaded and all those, those, you know, things got cut off, all those connections got cut off to us. We wouldn't be able to do what we do. So I think that the Chinese, you know, it's not like you're going into Taiwan and there's like this big pot of gold.

• 2:27:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:27:09Speaker 05

  There is a, there is an amazing, amazing intellectual operation that requires the active participation of hundreds of high quality engineers with. Machines that need to be updated constantly and and the software that needs to be updated constantly. That's all gonna collapse.

• 2:27:28Mark Gagnon?

  Couldn't China see the value in that and be like, hey, we're going to look the other way on certain things just to make sure that this factory keeps running the way it should be.

• 2:27:37Speaker 05

  But what if but the Germans would cut the ties and the Dutch would cut their ties and the Americans would cut their ties and and as I said, by the way, I also think the Americans would bomb the factory.

• 2:27:46Mark Gagnon?

  So the smarter way.

• 2:27:47Speaker 05

  The Chinese have tried to replicate.

• 2:27:49Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:49Speaker 05

  And remember, TSMC is basically a Taiwanese company, by which I mean it's all Chinese people, it's all ethnically Chinese people who, you know, in many cases who have fled the mainland. So you'd think it'd be pretty easy. They've spent, by some estimates, $200 billion trying to recreate a version of TSMC.

• 2:28:07Mark Gagnon?

  Can't do it.

• 2:28:08Speaker 05

  The chips they make are very low quality. They make a lot of chips. I mean, we use all the chips in our washing machines and things like that are often Chinese chips. They can't make the high-end chips.

• 2:28:17Mark Gagnon?

  What's China's?

• 2:28:18Speaker 05

  We can't make the high-end chips. Intel can't make the high-end chips.

• 2:28:20Mark Gagnon?

  What's China's influence in Africa?

• 2:28:23Speaker 05

  Oh, it's it's very real because they've provided a lot of assistance. They've they've built a lot of the infrastructure. But in my experience, traveling in Africa, the Africans, they like America a lot more. Because I'll tell you, one one program, George Bush, to give him credit, George W. Bush, PEPFAR, this is the AIDS prevention program. It probably has saved tens and tens and tens of millions of lives in Africa. Africa was being ravaged by AIDS and the Bush administration went in with a huge program

• 2:29:02Speaker 05

  that, you know, again, small on our budget, you're talking about, you know, probably a quarter of a percent of the federal budget. And it has saved. You know, tens and tens of millions of people's lives and people know it and people talk about it. When the Chinese come in, they build something, but they're like, and here's what we want in return. You know, there's a much more of a transaction. Quid pro quo. Quid pro quo.

• 2:29:26Speaker 06

  Isn't that how their batteries are so advanced that control the cobalt mines in Africa?

• 2:29:30Speaker 05

  It's not why they're so advanced because they got that raw material, but we could get the raw material. No, they've invested in it and they've, they're, they're very innovative. They're, they're not just copying.

• 2:29:39Speaker 06

  But they do have the cobalt mines, which is apparently the worst slavery conditions in human history.

• 2:29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, the getting, getting the, you know, but getting the raw material is only one part. The, the, the challenge with batteries is basically we've not found a way to, to make batteries much more productive. Battery technology has kind of gone up 10 or 15% a year over the last 20 years. It's kind of interesting mystery of why, you know, and then when you can get them to be, to be good, they're very heavy. This is one of the big problems with green technology, wind and solar, because any wind and solar plant, you need storage because the wind is not always blowing and the sun is not always shining. And we, if batteries were strong enough, we wouldn't need the backup that we have now, which is natural gas. Almost all these green technologies right now, they need a backup

• 2:30:26Speaker 05

  because you need something, you know, let's say you're, you're at a hospital, right? The hospital needs the power all the time. And, you know, Trump caricatures it by saying, oh, honey, the wind is not going, so I can't watch TV. That doesn't happen. And it doesn't happen because they all have a natural gas backup.

• 2:30:42Speaker 04

  Fusion.

• 2:30:44Speaker 05

  Now you're getting above my pay grade.

• 2:30:46Speaker 04

  Well, what about this idea that AI will get us exponentially closer to fusion? And once we're at fusion, EV, like any of the green technology used for energy is pretty much useless, gas will be useless. What do you think, are we doing anything to utilize AI to get us closer to that? Is it a pipe dream?

• 2:31:10Speaker 05

  Right. So fusion is the holy grail because it's, it's nuclear technology with no radioactive waste, with, with, with no instability, with no possibility of a meltdown. It's, you know, the way, it's the way energy is made in the sun. I think that.

• 2:31:31Speaker 05

  The people who are really smart about this, who I talk to, because I'll be honest, this is above my pay grade, say, we're getting closer and we've gotten closer than we have, than people were expecting to, but it's still going to be a lot of trial and error before you can be sure. There is one company that Sam Altman is the chairman of called Helion. Exactly. Which is

• 2:31:57Speaker 04

  Isn't Bezos involved in that too?

• 2:31:58Speaker 05

  He may be an investor and they're, they're planning by 28, 2028, which is three years from now, to have an operational power plant. They've actually already contracted to sell the power to Microsoft. So like, this is happening. My own guess is it'll be more in the nature of a pilot project, right? Like then an actual like scaling it and all that. But you're right, that if the promise of fusion is if you get it right, and if you can get it at the right cost, it solves all the energy problems. You know, then, then, and we are, as far as I can tell, we are, we are ahead of the Chinese in

• 2:32:38Speaker 04

  That's my assumption for why, like, you see Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states leaning so much, not only into like AI, but also leaning away from this dependence on natural gas. Because with AI, it's not like we're doing these computations by hand.

• 2:32:53Speaker 05

  No, exactly.

• 2:32:54Speaker 04

  Right? Like, if, if the time it takes is the trial and error, AI is a trial and error machine.

• 2:33:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:33:00Speaker 04

  Right?

• 2:33:01Speaker 05

  Hundred percent. That's why, by the, by the way, Bio, you know, so like Demis Hassabis, the, the guy at DeepMind who, who runs essentially Google's AI, who won the Nobel Prize. He says that he thinks AI will basically cure all diseases.

• 2:33:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:18Speaker 05

  Because a lot of what disease is trial and error. You know, you try stuff, it doesn't work, you try something else, you're right. And the AI can kind of do it a billion times.

• 2:33:28Speaker 04

  Synthetic data stats.

• 2:33:28Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. So, I mean, there's a lot of upsides to AI that are in some ways like unimaginable, because if you can really use AI, like, what could we do with climate change? What could we do with disease prevention? What could, so we have to hold out the hope that we get incredible benefits, and yet What I worry about is something that powerful is also going to be very disruptive. Right. And we are, and one thing that hasn't changed is human beings, like in our psyches and our, and our, you know, our degree of nervousness and anxiety and fear and, you know, in confronting all this disruption.

• 2:34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay, listen, we know that you have to go. We could talk to you forever. There's just one last thing. You had mentioned that you had met Kissinger a bunch. I think we've heard of Henry Kissinger as this like instrumental figure in like carving out the world as we know it today. Let's just remove what people think about him. Is he responsible for all the ills of the world? He's responsible for, is there anything in conversation with him that he's told you about negotiation? Like, are there any like tips that he's given you? Is there any wisdom that he's bestowed? Like, what is at the end of the day that people are wanting? Like, he's been in the room during some of the most important geopolitical conversations that kind of created the world we live in today. Have you asked him anything about that?

• 2:34:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's funny that you focus in on that because that is, that is, so he was a great scholar practitioner, right? So he had the unusual mind and he was a great negotiator. And I think for him, one of the reasons he was able to be a great negotiator is, I'll be honest about this, as a loyal, very proud patriotic American, most Americans can't put themselves in the, in the shoes of, of a foreigner, you know, where so, Americans are so.

• 2:35:21Speaker 04

  They wear shoes.

• 2:35:22Speaker 05

  Americans, exactly, exactly.

• 2:35:24Speaker 04

  They made them.

• 2:35:25Speaker 05

  Very, very, very well said. Americans are so, you know, I mean, we're insular country, big, vast, you know, we dominate the world. We don't care about what your person, because he was an immigrant, I think, because he was, because he was a Jew in Germany who came to America, you know, he had the, he was always able to put himself in the other person's shoes. And I'll be able to try to understand what the world looked like for that person and try to understand what it was that that person needed, what, you know, so one, one of the things I think about, I have so many thoughts where your question triggers, but one of them is that over the last 10 years of his life, what we talked, we'd often talk about was him trying to get inside Putin's head.

• 2:36:07Speaker 05

  He met Putin like thirty times, one on one, for hours at end. And what he, the reason he would do it was he was trying to understand like this. What does he want? What is, what are his motives? What is he, you know, because rather than just demonizing, he's trying to think, okay, what's going on? What does he need? What is keeping him in power? That skill, I think that's a muscle we Americans don't develop enough.

• 2:36:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, because we don't have to. Like, sometimes when you're the, the country in power, you don't have to be as empathetic.

• 2:36:37Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:36:37Speaker 04

  What did he say?

• 2:36:38Speaker 05

  Our way of negotiating with people is to say, here's what we want.

• 2:36:42Speaker 04

  So what did he say about Putin? What he, what was his conclusion?

• 2:36:44Speaker 05

  His point was this is this vast country, you know, the largest physical space in the world. He's, you know, he's facing a China that they've had historically very bad relations with. He, long border. During the Cold War, one third of the Soviet Army used to be tied up on the, on the Chinese border. Toward the south, he has all these, you know, south of Chechnya, you have all these Islamic countries. He's worried, he's worried about them. And, you know, he's got a western border where he sees a west that is modernizing, advancing, you know. So he's more, so his view was always that Putin was more fearful and defensive and reacting

• 2:37:28Speaker 05

  than offensive and imperial. And I, I would somewhat disagree with his perspective, but I think he, there was, there was a real, there was a reality there about the way that Putin saw the world. So he was always asking, is there a way to stand your ground, but also reassure him? You know, is there a way to, and so he was, he would have been a little more cautious about NATO expansion. He would have been.

• 2:37:54Speaker 04

  Because he knows that he's incredibly sensitive to invasion, and that's constant in his mind. So if there is native expansion, he is going to react.

• 2:38:02Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:38:03Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:38:03Speaker 05

  And so, and so, and so part of what always, so his thought was like, that's where you want to keep a continuous conversation going. That's why, and that's why you don't want to loosely say things like, oh, we want democracy in Russia, because he reads that as you want regime.

• 2:38:17Speaker 04

  Let's go.

• 2:38:17Speaker 05

  You want to topple my regime, you know, you would so don't use use ideological words like that loosely.

• 2:38:24Speaker 04

  It will trigger him and rile him up, yeah.

• 2:38:26Speaker 05

  Right, so it was, you know, he was always very sensitive to the idea that people in those positions are very, they want to preserve power, they want to preserve the coherence of their country, you know, so, you know, he was also, you know, we talked a little bit about Iran, and he would similarly say, you know, we've got to ask ourselves, what do the Iranians need? It can't just be about what do we need, because you're not going to get a deal that lasts for the long term.

• 2:38:52Speaker 04

  If they're not satisfied.

• 2:38:53Speaker 05

  If there's not something that they get out of it, you know, so that was always his perspective, and he always, when he was negotiating, was, you know, was thinking in those terms. It's what pissed off a lot of people in America, you know, that's why he, I mean, he made the opening to China, the right got very upset with him, he, you know, made a deal on Vietnam, the left got very, you know, he's, but he was always trying to say, look, the world in which we live in is a world of grays, there's no, you know, if you want to look for total victory, total, that's not going to happen, you've got to, you've got to find a deal where each side can walk away feeling at least that they preserve some shred of their dignity.

• 2:39:32Speaker 04

  Yes. Fareed Zakaria, thank you so much.

• 2:39:36Speaker 05

  My pleasure.

• 2:39:37Speaker 04

  This is awesome, this is great, thank you. Tell people where they can see you, I'm sure they're going to want to consume more, obviously.

• 2:39:43Speaker 05

  CNN, Washington Post, and then back here, when you next invite me.

• 2:39:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:39:48Speaker 05

  Anytime, you're more than welcome, thank you so much, this is awesome.

• 2:39:51Speaker 04

  Thank you guys, this is so great. Oh, this is great.

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